How do you setup multiple-NIC vMotion? I had this question 3 times in the past couple of days during workshops so I figured it was worth explaining how to do this. It is fairly straight forward to be honest and it is more or less similar to how you would setup iSCSI with multiple vmknic’s. More or less as there is one distinct difference.

KB article has been published, including the video I recorded

You will need to bind each VMkernel Interface (vmknic) to a physical NIC. In other words:

Create a VMkernel Interface and give it the name “vMotion-01”

Go to the settings of this Portgroup and configure 1 physical NIC-port as active and all others as “standby” (see the screenshot below for an example)

Create a second VMkernel Interface and give it the name “vMotion-02”

Go to the settings of this Portgroup and configure a different NIC-port as active and all others as “standby”

and so on…

Now when you will initiate a vMotion multiple NIC ports can be used. Keep in mind that even when you vMotion just 1 virtual machine both links will be used. Also, if you don’t have dedicated links for vMotion you might want to consider using Network I/O Control. vMotion can saturate a link and at least when you’ve set up Network I/O Control and assigned the right amount of shares each type of traffic will get what it has been assigned.

For a video on how to do this:



<update: dvSwitch details below>

For people using dvSwitches it is fairly straight forward: You will need to create two dvPortgroups. These portgroup will need to have the “active/standby” setup (Teaming and Failover section). After that you will need to create two Virtual Adapters and bind each of these to a specific dvPortgroup.

And again the video on how to set this up:



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