6.7

Table Of Contents
Setting Description
Peak bandwidth The maximum number of bits per second to allow across a port when it is sending
and receiving a burst of traffic. This tops the bandwidth used by a port whenever it
is using its burst bonus.
Burst size The maximum number of bytes to allow in a burst. If this parameter is set, a port
might gain a burst bonus when it does not use all its allocated bandwidth.
Whenever the port needs more bandwidth than specified by Average bandwidth,
it might temporarily transmit data at a higher speed if a burst bonus is available.
This parameter tops the number of bytes that might be accumulated in the burst
bonus and thus transferred at a higher speed.
7 (Optional) On the Teaming and failover page, edit the settings and click Next.
Setting Description
Load balancing Specify how to choose an uplink.
n
Route based on 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, disable EtherChannel.
Network failure 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 case of failover. If you select Yes, whenever
a virtual NIC is connected to the distributed switch or whenever that virtual NIC’s
traffic might 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.
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