Configure NIC teaming for V Switch

Two or more NIC cards are required to use NIC teaming in ESX server.

Step 1 : Create a new vSwitch and give it a network label like "VM Network” . Add the required NICs to the switch. Procedure on how to add nic to a virtual switch is described below

Select the vSwitch from the Configuration -> networking . Select Network adapters and click on add

In the Add Adapter Wizard select the nic card which needs to be added to the switch and click on next. If the nic card is already attached to another virtual switch, it will be removed from it and added to the new one.. Go to next screen

In the failover order, we can configure the active and standby adapters if required. Click next and finish the configuration

Step 2: Configure teaming

Configuring teaming in Esx server will implement load balancing for outbound traffic only. For implementing the same for inbound traffic the required configurations need to be done on the physical switch to which the NICs are actually connected

Switch configuration steps

Suppose two nics vnic0 and vnic1 are added to a virtual switch vswitch0. vnic0 and vnic1 are physical adapters connected to switch ports gi0/23 and gi0/24

1) Create a port channel in the switch for the ports.

Commands used for the same in Cisco Catalyst IOS-based physical switches are given below:

s3(config)#int port-channel1

s3(config-if)#description NIC team for ESX server

s3(config-if)#int gi0/23

s3(config-if)#channel-group 1 mode on

s3(config-if)#int gi0/24

s3(config-if)#channel-group 1 mode on

This creates port-channel1 and assigns GigabitEthernet0/23 and GigabitEthernet0/24 into team

2) Ensure that the load balancing mechanism that is used by both the switch and ESX Server matches. To find out the switch’s current load balancing mechanism, use this command in enable mode:

show etherchannel load-balance

This will report the current load balancing algorithm in use by the switch. We can either use IP- based load balancing or MAC-based load balancing . IP-based option gives better utilization across the members of the NIC team than some of the other options

3) Set the switch load-balancing algorithm using one of the following commands in global configuration mode:

port-channel load-balance src-dst-ip (to enable IP-based load balancing)

port-channel load-balance src-mac (to enable MAC-based load balancing)

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