At initial implementation time, you can select and assign the teaming and failover policy on each port group for each required VxRail network. The following load-balancing policies are supported for VxRail clusters:
- Route based on the originating virtual port—After the virtual-distributed switch selects a virtual machine or VMkernel adapter uplink, it always forwards traffic through that uplink. This option makes a simple selection that is based on the available physical uplinks. However, this policy does not attempt to load balance based on network traffic.
- Route based on source MAC hash—The virtual switch selects an uplink for a virtual machine that is based on the virtual machine MAC address. While it requires more resources than using the originating virtual port, it has more flexibility in uplink selection. This policy does not attempt to load balance based on network traffic analysis.
- Use explicit failover order—Always use the highest order uplink that passes failover detection criteria from the active adapters. No load-balancing is performed with this option.
- Route based on physical NIC load—The virtual switch monitors network traffic and attempts to adjust overloaded uplinks by moving traffic to another uplink. This option does use additional resources to track network traffic.
VxRail does not support the “Route based on IP Hash” policy. This policy has a dependency on the logical link setting of the physical port adapters on the switch.
VxRail applies a default teaming and failover policy configuration that is based on the following rules:
- If the teaming policy is set to “active/active,” the default load balance policy set by VxRail is: Route based on physical NIC load.
- If the teaming policy is set to “active/standby,” the default load balance policy set by VxRail is: Route based on originating virtual port.
If the Ethernet adapters targeted to support vSAN support RDMA, the following teaming policies are supported:
- Route based on originating virtual port.
- Route based on source MAC hash.
- Use explicit failover order.