VSphere 4.1 NIC Teaming Question

[Adamster]

Hello,

I am new to the forum as well as VMWare overall, so forgive me if this question is in the wrong thread.

We are setting up VSphere essentials for the first time in our network. We have a server with 4 on board NIC's and 4 PCI-e NIC extension slot. So in total 8. Out of those eight, NIC 0 and 1, I have already setup for Management, NIC 3 - 7, I would like to bond together so that all VM's have increased network bandwith. I created a vswitch and assigned NIC 3-7 in it and setup all my virtual machines to use the new Vswitch and I also setup NIC teaming as shown in the attached screenshot. But when I go to the server (2003), I only see the NIC speed = 1 NIC, 1Gbps . How can I get this speed to be increased or rather what am I doing wrong :-)?

Thank you,

Adam.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

You can't do link aggregation with ESX(i) except for the Enterprise Plus edition with the Cisco NEXUS 1000V add-on.

The NIC's you attached to the vSwitch are assigned to the VMs in a round-robin manner, that's why you have 1 GBit/s per VM. If you really need it, you could take a look at the "Route based on IP hash" configuration which requires that you configure EtherChannel on the physical switch ports. However this only uses different NIC's to different destination IP addresses, you will never have more than 1 GBit/s to a specific target IP.

Take a look at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf

This documentation explains the different configurations.

André

[rickardnobel]

But when I go to the server (2003), I only see the NIC speed = 1 NIC, 1Gbps.

Besides to what a.p. says for how the frames are actually spread across the physical NICs (vmnic) what you see in the virtual machine is only a virtual network adapter (called vNIC). So you shall not expect to see all six of your physical port there.

Even if you "only" has 1Gbit outgoing speed per VM to destinations outside the vSphere Host, you could very well get for exampel 3Gbit/sec between two VMs that are on the same vSwitch on the same host.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Bandwidth numbers seen by the Guest OS device driver are as high as those devices allow. You can achieve higher throughput if the network traffic is entirely within the same portgroup of a vSwitch. But this does not mean the device drivers will ever report greater than 1Gbit of bandwidth.

Other than the link aggregation method used for link redundancy, NIC Teaming does load balancing which implies VMs are assigned to a pNIC in the fashion chosen when you create the VM. This assignment happens at VM boot time.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, 2010

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[Adamster]

Thank you all:-)