Nic Teaming on HP DL380 G7

[jasonblake7]

Hi Guys.

Im new to Vmware and will be virtualising 4 servers soon. The proposed host will be a HP DL380 G7 Server which has 2 NC382i Dual Port 1GB NICs

Local storage is being used for the DataStore with the disks being 10K SAS Drives in a Raid 10 Array.

I was planning on Teaming 2 1GB Ports for the VMs to use. My question is would all the physical adapters configured in the team constantly be used for Data or is one disabled until a failure is detected and then it would cut in ?

Would 2 nics in a team give enough bandwidth for a host running 4 VMS ?

Thanks for any replies.

Jason

[AWo]

The standard is that all pNICs attached to a vSwitch run in failover and load balancing mode. But you can change that and configure ports as standby and others as active.

2 NICs in a team are ususally enough for 4 guests. Using the default load balancon policy, ich vNIC of a guest attached to the vSwitch will be routed over one of the pNIC's in a round rbin fashion. So you will end up with two vNIC's per pNIC port. This is not a bundling of the phyiscal pNIC ports to 2 GB/s.

If you want to achieve this you need an intelligent switch which supports load balancing protocols.

AWo

[jasonblake7]

We have 2 Dlink 48 port Switches at the moment. One is a DGS-1248T and the other is a DGS-1210-48. Im not sure if they support the LB protocols.

[iw123]

Hi,

You can configure the nics for either load balancing or failover depending on your needs. Your best bet is to check out the vsphere networking guide, which covers all the various options you have available to you: http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-networking-guide.pdf

Thanks