Guest nic teaming Windows Server 2012 R2

[fafa24]

Dear All,

I'm wondering if using the nic teaming feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 inside a guest make sense with ESXi 5.5 hosts? Currently we have assigned one vxnet3 vnic to the Win2012 R2 guest. We are using nic teaming for the hosts.

Would adding one more nic to the guest improve the network performance for the guest?

Thanks,

Edy

[Linjo]

I would say no, it would add complexity and more things that can fail.

Do the network redundancy on the vSphere layer instead.

// Linjo

[JPM300]

Now that his is possible in Windows I have been doing some thinking about this as well.  Since most of the more advanced feature sets of the Microsoft NIC team(LACP, ect) require the switch to be awear I'm not sure how a vSS or a VDS would handle this and you would probably have to put it in NFT mode which would make it pointless.

NIC Teaming Overview

Like you said in your post the only reason to put more then 1 VNIC in a team on a VM would be in the hopes of pushing more then 1GB through a VM in the event your hosts nics are still only 1GB network adapaters.  This problem gets removed when you got the 10GB, however it would be nice to leverage this for infrastructures with 1GB adapters.

With that said I haven't tested it and if anyone has a link to a white papper or blog where they have some some testing on this I wouldn't mind seeing it :smileyhappy:

[fafa24]

Well my hosts (four) are in a Blade Chassis from Dell. Phyiscal nic internal have 10Gb. I have to admit I haven't looked closely at the host configuration yet to prioritize traffic for a guest. The Blade hosts have 2 10Gb which we partition for iSCSI, LAN and vMotion traffic.

Thanks,

[BWU111]

Try setting all but one of the [VMXNET3 simulated physical] Microsoft Windows 2012 R2 host NICs as a standby adapter; I am assuming you just want to LAB converged networks using an SCVMM uplink port profile and as such you don't really need the 20GBs-1, you just want something that works after you add a few virtual network adapters to your logical switch.  Try Teaming mode "Switch Independent", Load balancing mode "Dynamic" and Standby adapter "Ethernet 2".  Having said that, I'd like to know if there is VMWARE ESXi 5.5 guest Microsoft Windows 2012 R2 NIC teaming configuration that works with a Microsoft host logical switch and virtual network adapters but it finding out right now would be a tangent to my goals of learning SCVMM 2012 R2.

[vfk]

I would agree Linjo, the added complexity is not worth it, also  vSphere would provide network availability if correctly configured.

[jrmunday]

I'd agree with Linjo ... I can't see any added benefits for the added complexity and management overhead.

Cheers,

Jon