NIC Teaming

[dap]

Is there a way to provide NIC teaming inside a Windows 2003 vm server. Basically we need to provide more bandwidth to a server. We added the second virtual nic to server but it is not teamed. Thanks

[kingsfan01]

NIC Teaming is usually performed by a util provided by the NIC mfgr and I don't believe the VMware driver has the capability to do so. Have you taken a look at Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) within the VM? I have no idea if this will give you any increased performance but it is worth a shot. What kind of app are you running that requires such bandwidth?

Tyler

[kukacz · Accepted solution]

Do you need to team 2 physical interfaces against a physical switch? Then you should have 2 physical nics configured in a single Virtual Switch on the ESX side. On the switch side you need to enable static (non-protocol) trunking (if the switch is Cisco, then replace trunking for EtherChannel) of those 2 ports. Also you should set the balancing policy of the VSwitch and the switch trunk to "IP based". You can't expect this to be one big pipe for everything, but it should balance well for multiple clients - IP pairs.

You can find some info about ESX teaming in my blog Kukacz Notes. An article about teaming non-Cisco switches should be published there tomorrow.

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Lukas Kubin

[Ken_Cline]

Is there a way to provide NIC teaming inside a Windows 2003 vm server. Basically we need to provide more bandwidth to a server. We added the second virtual nic to server but it is not teamed. Thanks

OK...let me ask a silly question - what makes you think that you need more bandwidth out of a single VM? Are you using gigabit pNICs? If so, I find it very hard to believe that you have a single VM that is pushing more data than you can support out of one interface. Just about guarantee you that you're going to run out of CPU before you run out of network. If you're not using GbE, then I can see where you might be hitting a network bottleneck...

Ken Cline

Technical Director, Virtualization

Wells Landers

VMware Communities User Moderator

[dap]

Thanks for the posts. We were basically brainstorming about the best way to setup the networking on our vms and maybe fix another issue. We have nics teamed with 2 GB on our physical servers so we figured maybe we can do it on the vms. We have been having issues with backups on some virtual machines. We are using Arcserve 11.5 SP3. We are backing up the vms using a client agent. Some servers fail during the backup with an error "Backup server TCP reconnection timeout." We though maybe giving the server more bandwidth would help.

[Ken_Cline]

OK...you're teaming on the physical servers for redundancy more than for performance. In the virtual world, you get the redundancy at the vSwitch level rather than at the VM level. For your backup issues, how many VMs are you backing up at the same time? You should try to stagger your backup schedule so that you don't overload your host. Another option is to use VCB which takes the backup load off of the host entirely.

Ken Cline

Technical Director, Virtualization

Wells Landers

VMware Communities User Moderator