Designing a network for load balancing and failover for vSphere Standard Switch

The load balancing and failover policies that are chosen for the infrastructure can have an impact on the overall design. Using NIC teaming we can group several physical network adapters attached to a vSwitch. This grouping enables load balancing between the different physical NICs and provides fault tolerance if a card or link failure occurs.

Network adapter teaming offers a number of available load balancing and load distribution options. Load balancing is load distribution based on the number of connections, not on network traffic. In most cases, load is managed only for the outgoing traffic and balancing is based on three different policies:

• Route based on the originating virtual switch port ID (default)

• Route based on the source MAC hash

• Route based on IP hash

Also, we have two network failure detection options and those are:

• Link status only

• Beacon probing

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, you will need...