The port binding creates connections for the traffic between certain types of iSCSI and iSER adapters and the physical network adapters.

The following types of adapters require the port binding:
  • Software iSCSI adapter
  • Dependent hardware iSCSI adapter
  • VMware iSCSI over RDMA (iSER) adapter
The following tasks discuss the network configuration with a vSphere Standard switch and a single physical network adapter. If you have multiple network adapters, see Multiple Network Adapters in iSCSI or iSER Configuration.
Note: iSER does not support NIC teaming. When configuring port binding for iSER, use only one RDMA-enabled physical adapter (vmnic#) and one VMkernel adapter (vmk#) per vSwitch.

You can also use the VMware vSphere® Distributed Switch™ and VMware NSX® Virtual Switch™ in the port binding configuration. For information about NSX virtual switches, see the VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere documentation.

If you use a vSphere distributed switch with multiple uplink ports, for port binding, create a separate distributed port group per each physical NIC. Then set the team policy so that each distributed port group has only one active uplink port. For detailed information on distributed switches, see the vSphere Networking documentation.

What to do next

For other configuration steps you can perform for the iSCSI or iSER storage adapters, see the following topics: