Understanding NIC Teaming and Load Balancing Policies in virtual switch

NIC Teaming

In its simplest terms NIC teaming means that we are taking multiple physical NICs on a given ESXi host and combining them into a single logical link that provides bandwidth aggregation and redundancy to a vSwitch. NIC teaming can be used to distribute load among the available uplinks of the team.  A NIC teaming configuration can look like as shown in below screenshot:

There are several Load Balancing policies available for the virtual switch. These are discussed as below:

1: Route Based on Originating virtual Port-ID: This is the default load balancing policy for a vSS or vDS. This policy doesn’t require any special configuration to be done at virtual switch level or physical switch level.

In this policy when a NIC is added to a VM or a new VM is provisioned with a NIC and comes online, VMkernel assigns a Port-ID to the virtual NIC of the VM.Read More