Nic Teaming with 4 nics (active/active)

[Stanleyj420]

I have a single ESX Host with 6 nics that is going to be placed offsite for hosting a few backup systems.  I only need two port groups setup with one being our production network and second being for an internal private network.  I was thinking of setting the prod vswitch with 4 nics teamed set all active and the second vswitch with two ports both setup as active. The physical switch will just be setup standard without any type of port channeling.

In the vswitch with 4 nics does this setup ensure that any of the 4 nics can be used at any given time or are technically 3 of them not getting used until a fail over occurs?

I would like to ensure I'm getting full use of all my nics with minimal configuration.  I appreciate any feedback. Thanks.

FYI: We do not have control of the physical switch so unfortunately i have to work with what i have. 

[IRIX201110141 · Accepted solution]

To make it short. You do it absolutely right. Its KISS and will solve all problems and will never kick you into your ass. You assumption is not 100% right. If an uplink group have multiple acvtive NICs and you have configure the default Loadbalacing behavior than the first starting VM will assigned to use the first active Nic. When the second VM starts it will get the second Nic .... the 5th. VM get the first NIC and so on. So when you have a lot of VMs on that Portgroup all 4 active NICs will be in use. As long as nothing happens the ESXi will not change VM<->VMNIC assignment. Regards, Joerg

[Stanleyj420]

Ok so its not like a round robin.  The vm will stick with whichever nic it grabs first.  So there is a chance one nic could possibly be utilized way more than the others, but the other nics are available for use at any given time. 

In the case of a single nic failure will the vms using that nic start using one of the others available or will they be considered down since i dont have any in stand by? 

[IRIX201110141]

Its some way of round robin but you havent any kind of control.  If you need control than you can insert some $$$ and than there is NIOC 🙂

If you loose an active uplink the ESXi will assign another NIC from the active NICs to effected VM. So there is no need to have one in StandBy in that case.

Regards
Joerg

[Stanleyj420]

Thank you so much for the info.  This is effectively what i was shooting for and making sure i was on the right track.  Since we have no control over the switch i was trying to utilize all the nics and have redundancy the best we could.