ESX NIC Teaming and VLANs
October 15th, 2007 | 
Author: Every time I have to work with a customer’s networking engineers, or even my own Cisco consultants, I get funny looks when I have to tell them that there is not much to the nic teaming configuration on an ESX server.
Once a vSwitch is created it’s just a matter of assigning multiple physical NICs, creating port groups with the assigned VLANs, and setting the right policy. To the disbelief of the network guys, that can be done without adding any driver utilities or third party management software. After that ESX will load balance traffic headed out of the ESX host to the physical switch and provide redundancy for NIC fail over. Up to this point no changes to the switch are even needed.
On the physical switch side it does require more involved set up to provide inbound load balancing and setting up an ether channel. There are many guides already available on how to do this. Here are a few for reference:
ESX Server, NIC Teaming, and VLAN Trunking – blog.scottlowe.org
VMware ESX Server 3 802.1Q VLAN Solutions
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