Cisco Cisco Nexus 5010 Switch Libro bianco

White Paper 

© 2010 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

Page 48 of 56

 

Creating Teams or Bonds 
VMware ESX supports two modes of teaming: 

 

Load Balancing 

 

Network Failure Detection. 

 

ESX provides the following four modes of load balancing (a) Virtual Switch Port based (b) MAC based (c) IP Hash 

based and (d) Explicit Failover Order based. In any ESX environment, load balancing only applies to transmitted 

traffic. Enabling load balancing on received traffic requires proper configuration of the external physical switch.

Virtual Switch Port based load balancing: 

In a VMware topology, Virtual Machines (VMs) contain Virtual NICs (vNICs) which are attached to Virtual Switches.  

Each vNIC connects to a Virtual Switch through a Virtual Port, which is analogous to a physical port on a physical 

switch.  Virtual Switch Port based load balancing routes vNIC networking traffic to/from a physical NIC (pNIC) based 

on Virtual Port assignment.  This means that all networking traffic for a particular vNIC passes through the same 

pNIC.  Virtual Port-to-pNIC assignment is done in a round-robin fashion to ensure even distribution of traffic amongst 

physical NICs.  This load balancing mode requires no external switch configuration. 

MAC based load balancing: 

MAC based load balancing routes vNIC networking traffic to/from a pNIC based on the vNIC’s MAC address.  This is 

similar to Virtual Switch Port based load balancing in that all networking traffic for a particular vNIC always passes 

through the same pNIC and no external switch configuration is required.   

IP Hash based load balancing: 

IP Hash based load balancing routes vNIC networking traffic to/from a pNIC based on the source and destination IP 

addresses of each transmitted packet.  All networking traffic for a particular source and destination IP address pair 

will pass through the same pNIC.  Assuming a vNIC is passing traffic to multiple IP destinations, the vNIC’s traffic will 

be sent and received through multiple pNICs.  IP hash based load balancing enables link aggregation, whereby 

multiple pNICs can be grouped to provide a fatter networking pipe with aggregated bandwidth.  This requires that the 

external switch is configured for 802.3ad teaming in static mode.