NIC Teaming

[lucheman]

On ESX 3.0.1, how do I setup a NIC team for redundancy/failover only?

How do I setup a NIC team for load balancing?

How do I (or can I) setup a NIC team for port aggregation (2GB)?

What do most people do as best practices and why?

Thanks!

[VirtualNoitall]

Hello,

Here is a good doc that steps you through it: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2006/12/04/esx-server-nic-teaming-and-vlan-trunking/

Basically to get this setup for both incoming and outgoing traffic you need to setup both the vswitch and the physical switch.

port aggregation may no be what you think. You don't get 2GB rather 2 x 1GB that you load blanace your virtual machines nics over based on ip, mac, etc based on your config.

Hope that helps!

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Assuming you already have added your NICs to your virtual switch, you would then go to configuration \ networking and then click on the properties for your vswitch. Select the port group you want to modify, click on edit and then on the NIC team tab. You can then select which NIC will be active and which will be the standy.

If both NICs are active, ESX will do outbound load balancing by default.\

How many NICs do you have in the server you're configuring? Configuration will depend on the NIC count and what services you need (eg - vmotion, iscsi).

Here are some goods links to look at:

http://www.vmware-land.com/Vmware_Links.html#Networking

[lucheman]

I have 3 ESX 3.0.1 servers with 4 NICS in each blade server. All blade servers are in a single HP C Class Chassis with 4 GBE2C switches. I have dedicated one NIC for VMotion traffic (NIC2). I want to leave one NIC in case we plan to connect to a different network or a DMZ at some point from these boxes(NIC3). Right now, NIC0 is being used for the service console and for production Virtual Machine networks on VSwitch0. I just want to add NIC1 to VSwitch0 and team it with NIC0 for redundancy.

[darren_boyd]

In that case I would recommend teaming two pNICs for use by vmotion and SC (you can set up each to use a preferred uplink), and teaming two pNICs for VMs. If you introduce VLANs as well than you have redundancy at the service console level to protect against isolation events for HA and segregated traffic as well. The same can be said for your VM switch. If you wanted to add a DMZ later you could still make the addition with little trouble.