vNetowrk : Can we?

[v-4-virtual]

can you combine two 1gb physical nics to work as single 2 gb nic

[Lee_Sargeant]

Unfortunately no.  You can attach multiple physical nics as uplinks but a single VM will never get more than 1GB of throughput.  Multiple VMs will use all the available throughput though.

[v-4-virtual]

Thanks for your tim ein answering quetsion,

Could you please point me to relevant documentation to digg deeper in to achieving this or are there any possible ways to get this done ?

Or we will have to do it at switch level .. just curious to find possible ways.

Thanks,

v

[DSTAVERT]

This link is a good one for information on virtual networking. http://www.vmware.com/technical-resources/virtual-networking/

[a_p_]

Basically you can use EtherChannel to aggregate NICs for more throughput. However, with VMware's virtual switches (standard and distributed switches) it's only the outbound traffic that is affected. If you want to have outbound and inbound traffic aggregated you need to license Enterprise Plus with the Nexus 1000V addition. see http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf and http://www.vmware.com/products/vnetwork-distributed-switch/features.html

André

[smaclaren · Accepted solution]

If I understand your question properly then yes, actually, you kind of can!

If you have two or more available physical NICs on the host, each plugged (ideally) into a separate switch you can then assign these two network cards to a VM.

On the VM you then TEAM these NICS so they appear as one.  This provides two benefits:  1:- you get fault tolerance on your NICs and Switches (if one NIC or one switch is lost - the VM never sees it) and 2:- teaming allow for some level of load balancing, you wont get a true 2GB throughput but you will have better response during heavy network traffic than a single nic will give you. 

The ability to TEAM may be hardware specific, I use HP and have this implemented and running