How many Physical VMware vSphere Network Adapters do you currently have in your vSphere ESXi Hosts? I would say the more the merrier! And the reason for this is it gives us more flexibility in a good number of situations.
For example we can leverage the NIC Teaming configurations, provide redundancy for active connections by mean of Active/Active or Active/Stand-By, assigning specific traffic to the fastest network cards and last but not least the ability to effectively separate the traffic types between several physical network cards.
Let’s take a quick look how to configure physical VMware vSphere Network Adapters for our home lab and get advantage of VMare vSphere Networking capabilities.
Configure physical VMware vSphere Network Adapters
By taking a look at the Physical Adapters in the Host and Cluster > Manage > Network view we can get the most important information for the configured network cards along with their enabled properties that can help us with more information about the desired network design.
By clicking on the pencil icon it is possible to change (if needed) the adapter speed or leave it to auto negotiate. More interestingly from the bottom panel we can also review and enable separately other options like the Wake-On-Lan, the SR-IOV, the CDP and LLDP protocols when supported.
By clicking instead on the first Globe Icon we can in turn add/change a VMkernel, a Physical Network Adapter or a Virtual Machine Port Group.
So for example to add a secondary Network Adapter to the existing vSwith0 let’s go for the second option.
Now let’s choose the vSwitch.
At this point we can use the wizard to Add, move and remove the physical netwotk adapters.
And a final review before committing.
At this point by revisiting the virtual Switches view we should see the configuration updated with something similar to this.
And this concludes this quick overview of the configuration for the physical network adapters in VMware vSphere. More information will be covered in detail during the setup and configuration of VMware TCP/IP Stacks, VMkernel and vSwitches.