NIC Teaming

[CS70794]

Hi all,

I was wondering what is the best option for teaming NICs.

I got an HP Server running ESXi with Essentials Kit. The server comes with 2 NICs and each has 2 Ports that are connected to the same network but for redundancy on different switches.
NIC1: Port 1 -> Sw1 & Port 2 -> Sw2
NIC2: Port 2 -> Sw1 & Port 2 -> Sw2

My question is what is the best setup.
Do I create one vSwitch on the ESXi with all the 4 Ports and present only 1 virtual NIC to the guest or should I create a vSwitch for each NIC and then present one virtual NIC from each switch and team those virtual NICs within the guest OS.

I don't think I will ever reach the full bandwidth of the NICs. My main concern is redundancy and a setup with the least overhead to the system.

[a_p_]

Assuming that the physical switch ports are configured with the same settings (VLANs, etc.), I'd go with a single vSwitch with all 4 uplinks.
By default, ESXi assigns the vmnics to the VMs in a Round-Robin manner as the VM is powered on. If that is not sufficient for you, you can always create multiple VM port groups on the vSwitch, and use the Teaming&Failover settings to override vmnic assignments.

André

[DARKINF]

Using several vSwitch is not about redundancy, you achieve redundancy by using several NICs in port groups that are connected to different switchers. So better to stay with one vSwitch and configure redundancy/load balancing on a port group level

[CS70794]

I'm aware of that, I was just wondering how others would do it and if there would be a performance hit due to the overhead if I added all the NICs to one switch.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

No, there's no ESXi performance difference in createing a single vSwitch with multiple vmnics vs. multiple vSwitches with less vmnics.

André

[CS70794]

Thank you both for your answers. 1 vSwitch it is then. 🙂