Load balancing on NIC's

[gheywood]

Hello,

Our ESX server has six NIC’s. Two for SAN, one for the dedicated Service Console, and three for the VM’s LAN traffic. One thing I have noticed looking in the performance tab in VC, is that all of the LAN traffic appears to go over one of the three NIC’s, and the other two are practically idle.

If I look at the network configuration for the vSwitch that has those three NICs, NIC Teaming is set for “Route based on the originating virtual port ID”.

Can anyone advise on how to get a more “democractic” use of the three NIC’s?

Also seen on http://www.eqlforums.com !

[Ken_Cline · Accepted solution]

How many virtual machines do you have on the host? With the load balancing algorithm you have selected (the default), traffic is balanced at the vNIC level (i.e. all traffic from a given vNIC will always traverse the same pNIC). This is the case for all but the IP Hash algorithm, which requires you to 802.3ad static port aggregation on your pSwitch. In most cases, there is no need to worry about the pNIC utilization - if it's a GbE NIC, you're probably not close to pushing its limits.

Ken Cline

Technical Director, Virtualization

Wells Landers

TVAR Solutions, A Wells Landers Group Company

VMware Communities User Moderator

[gheywood]

Hello,

There are 10 VM's running on that host. Thanks for that. I will monitor it further then and see what happens. If it does become an issue, I will look at port aggregation.

Cheers!

Also seen on http://www.eqlforums.com !