6.0

Edit the Teaming and Failover Policy on a Distributed Port Group
Teaming and Failover policies allow you to determine how network traffic is distributed between adapters
and how to re-route traffic in the event of an adapter failure.
Prerequisites
Launch the vSphere Client and log in to a vCenter Server system.
Procedure
1 Log in to the vSphere Client and select the Networking inventory view.
2 Right-click the distributed port group in the inventory pane, and select Edit Settings.
3 Select Policies.
4 In the Teaming and Failover group specify the following.
Option Description
Load Balancing
Specify how to choose an uplink.
n
Route based on the originating virtual port — Choose an uplink
based on the virtual port where the traffic entered the distributed
switch.
n
Route based on ip hash — Choose an uplink based on a hash of the
source and destination IP addresses of each packet. For non-IP packets,
whatever is at those offsets is used to compute the hash.
n
Route based on source MAC hash — Choose an uplink based on a
hash of the source Ethernet.
n
Route based on physical NIC load — Choose an uplink based on the
current loads of physical NICs.
n
Use explicit failover order — Always use the highest order uplink
from the list of Active adapters which passes failover detection criteria.
NOTE IP-based teaming requires that the physical switch be configured
with etherchannel. For all other options, etherchannel should be disabled.
Network Failover Detection
Specify the method to use for failover detection.
n
Link Status only – Relies solely on the link status that the network
adapter provides. This option detects failures, such as cable pulls and
physical switch power failures, but not configuration errors, such as a
physical switch port being blocked by spanning tree or that is
misconfigured to the wrong VLAN or cable pulls on the other side of a
physical switch.
n
Beacon Probing – Sends out and listens for beacon probes on all NICs
in the team and uses this information, in addition to link status, to
determine link failure. This detects many of the failures previously
mentioned that are not detected by link status alone.
NOTE Do not use beacon probing with IP-hash load balancing.
Notify Switches
Select Yes or No to notify switches in the case of failover.
If you select Yes, whenever a virtual NIC is connected to the distributed
switch or whenever that virtual NIC’s traffic would be routed over a
different physical NIC in the team because of a failover event, a
notification is sent out over the network to update the lookup tables on
physical switches. In almost all cases, this process is desirable for the
lowest latency of failover occurrences and migrations with vMotion.
NOTE Do not use this option when the virtual machines using the port
group are using Microsoft Network Load Balancing in unicast mode. No
such issue exists with NLB running in multicast mode.
vSphere Administration with the vSphere Client
264 VMware, Inc.