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BP1024 Scaling and Best Practices for Virtual Workload Environments with the FS7500 11
Figure 4 vSwitch with MAC Based or Port based load balancing
Using MAC or port-based vSwitch load balancing schemes does not provide the increased bandwidth
or redundancy that can be achieved by using multiple physical NIC uplinks from the ESX host for NFS
traffic. In order to balance the load on the physical uplink NICs on vSwitch using the single vmknic
port, we have to rely on the IP hash-based load balancing policy available on the vSwitch. If multiple
target IP addresses available on NAS are used, then traffic from the single vmknic port can be load
balanced across multiple uplinks using this load balancing policy (See Figure 5 below). The physical
switch that the physical uplink ports are connected to needs to be configured with a similar load
balancing policy using static link aggregation group (LAG). This policy can effectively load balance NFS
traffic from the ESXi host to the NFS server across multiple uplinks.