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baber
Expert
Expert

Why set nic teaming on vswitch

dear all

hi

i want to know what is difference between nic teaming on vswitch and nic teaming on portgroups?

br

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bayupw
Leadership
Leadership

Teaming and failover settings on PortGroups are inherited from vSwitch settings.

Let say you have a vSwitch and teaming using using Route Based on Originating Port ID on all vmnics.

Everytime you create a PortGroup, by default it will inherit the same settings Route Based on Originating port ID on all vmnics - think of it like a global settings per vSwitch.

You would normally need to configure in the PortGroup when you need to override the vSwitch settings so for example on a certain PortGroup on that vSwitch you would like one of the vmnic to be standby/unused.

Edit a Standard Switch Port Group

"By using the vSphere Web Client, you can edit the name and VLAN ID of a standard switch port group, and override networking policies at the port group level."

Bayu Wibowo | VCIX6-DCV/NV
Author of VMware NSX Cookbook http://bit.ly/NSXCookbook
https://github.com/bayupw/PowerNSX-Scripts
https://nz.linkedin.com/in/bayupw | twitter @bayupw
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ScottDriver42
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

As Bayu said, you have the ability to change the teaming settings on a per port group basis. The most common use case that I've run across for this is when configuring iSCSI for multipathing.

If you presume a scenario where you have a pair of 10Gb interfaces (vmnic1 & vmnic2)  on a single vSwitch and on that vSwitch you have three port groups: vmotion, iscsi1 & iscsi2. You want to have nic redundancy for your vMotion portgroup, so you configure teaming with both nics active at the vSwitch level. However in order to add a compatible vmk to your iSCSI initiator, you can only have one physical nic as active (or standby) on the portgroup. The way to accommodate this is to override the nic team settings on the port group, setting one of the adapters to Unused. For example port group iscsi 1 has vmnic 1 set as the active adapter, with vmnic2 set to unused. The converse would be true for the port group iscsi1, vmnic2 is active and vmnic1 is set to unused.

In the above example you are leveraging the flexibility to have different teaming policies at the vswitch or port group level.

If you find this helpful, please click 'like'.

Cheers!

Blog: https://virtualvt.wordpress.com/ | Twitter: VTsnowboarder42
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