Add and Team Physical Adapters in a vSphere Standard Switch

Assign a physical adapter to a standard switch to provide connectivity to virtual machines and VMkernel adapters on the host. You can form a team of NICs to distribute traffic load and to configure failover.

NIC teaming combines multiple network connections to increase throughput and provide redundancy should a link fail. To create a team, you associate multiple physical adapters to a single vSphere Standard Switch.

Procedure

1. In the vSphere Web Client, navigate to the host.
2. On the Configure tab, expand Networking and select Virtual switches.
3. Select the standard switch you want to add a physical adapter to.
4. Click the Manage the physical network adapters connected to the selected switch icon.
5. Add one or more available physical network adapters to the switch.
   1. Click Add adapters.
   2. Select the failover order group to assign the adapters to.
      The failover group determines the role of the adapter for exchanging data with the external network, that is, active, standby or unused. By default, the adapters are added as active to the standard switch.
   3. Click OK
   The selected adapters appear in the selected failover group list under the Assigned Adapters list.
6. (Optional) Use the up and down arrows to change the position of an adapter in the failover groups.
7. Click OK to apply the physical adapter configuration.