Behavior of a VM when placed on Standard vSwitch with multiple active adapters

[DukeR]

Hey everyone

At the moment I am concentrating on the network design aspect of vSphere and I have question on this:

If I have a vSwitch with a port group and attached to this port group there are 2 vNIC or better NICs and i've chosen Route based on Port ID and all adapters are active what happens to the machines when i unplug one cord? Lets assume vm1 is on vnic 0 and vm2 on vnic1 and i disconnect the cord to vnic1. Will VM2 switch automatic to vnic0 or do i have to reboot? How do i have to take care of this issue when there is no auto failover? Create a etherchannel and both adapters active active?

Thanks and best regards

Michael

[schepp · Accepted solution]

Hi Michael,

your VM will be moved to the other vmnic to regain network access after the failure. No reboot needed.

This is indeed a very simple way of load balancing / teaming. When you power on a VM is bound to a vminc. As you correctly said for this example, vm1 goes to vmnic0, vm2 to vmnic1, vm3 to vmnic0 and vm4 to vmnic1.

This is the default setting as it's quite simple and you don't need any further switch configuration.

If you wanted to change this behaviour, for example build an etherchannel, don't forget to change the policy on the vSwitch / Portgroups, which would require a load balancing of "route based on IP hash".

Tim

[DukeR]

Hi Tim

Yes I am aware of this. Thank you very much for this short and good answer!

Enjoy and all the best

Michael