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VMware ESX server offers several different load balancing / NIC teaming options, but which one is right for you? In this article, we will explorer the different NIC teaming options available through the VI administration interface and show you how to configure your ESX server for maximum performance!
Network Architecture Basics
Lets begin with a little background into how VMware infrasture facilites networking. There are 4 basic components that make up the networking architecture: vNIC (virtual network interface card), vSwitch (virtual switch), Physical Network Adapters, and Physical Switches. We will assume you understand the basics of physical network adapters and switches and focus our attention on their virtualized equivalent.
vNIC:
A vNIC is similar to a physical NIC. Each virtual machine has one or more vNIC adapters that it uses to communicate with both the virtual and physical networks. Each vNIC has its own MAC address and can be assigned one or more IP address just like a NIC found in a non virtualized machine.
vSwitch:
A vSwitch is a virtualized version of a layer-2 physical switch. It too acts and responds just like its physical counterpart. However, in VMware we use vSwitches to not only connect our virtual machines to the virtual network, but also for communications with the physical network.
A vSwitch has 2 basic components: Port Groups and Uplink Connections. Port Groups provide connectivity to our vNIC's, its basically what we "plug" our virtual machines into for network connectivity. Uplink Connections serve as the bridge between our virtual and physical network(s). Uplinks allow us to attach our virtual switch(s) to one or more physical network adapters.
It's important to note that a physical NIC can only be attached to 1 vSwitch. In the diagram above, for simplicity, our ESX server is depicted with 4 physical NIC's, all of which are bound to a single vSwitch. However, our ESX server could have included several vSwitches with many more physical NIC adapters that could have had any number of physical interfaces bound to them. In-fact, the only way to perform NIC teaming is by binding 2 or more physical network adapters with a load balancing policy set on the vSwitch, but more about that in a moment.
The following table represents the limits for each of the networking components:
| Device |
Limit |
| vNIC adapters per virtual machine |
4 |
| vSwitch ports per ESX host |
4069 |
| vSwitch ports per vSwitch |
1016 |
| vSwitches per ESX host |
127 |
| Uplinks per vSwitch |
32 |
| Uplinks per ESX host |
32 |
| vSwitch port groups per ESX host |
512 |
| Physical NIC's per host |
Unlimited |
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Knowledge Base 
