Frank Denneman explains the mechanics of how this works in his article IP-Hash versus LBT, and Ken Cline wrote a good explanation in his article The Great vSwitch Debate вЂ“ Part 3. VMwareвЂ™s support and configuration of Etherchannel is explained in VMware KB 1004048. IP Hash Load Balancing, which requires Static Etherchannel or static 802.3ad be configured on the switching infrastructure, uses a hashing algorithm based on source and destination IP address to determine which host uplink egress traffic should be routed through. I wonвЂ™t explain all of the various options here as they are covered in the VMware Product Documentation and the purpose of this article is to discuss Etherchannel and Load Based Teaming. This however is not the same as a single virtual machine with a single IP address load balancing multiple uplinks and in most cases even this has very little real benefit. So you have four options if you are primarily concerned with load balancing the vSphere host uplinks. Use explicit failover order (Not a load balancing algorithm)ДЄll of the choices except вЂњUse explicit failover orderвЂќ offers uplink load balancing for the vSphere hosts. Route based on physical NIC load (Load Based Teaming or LBT) Route based on IP Hash (only one supported with Static Etherchannel and Static 802.3ad) This article will not discuss LACP in any detail for this reason. You can utilize LACP only if you deploy the Cisco Nexus 1000v or another add on vDS to you environment. Static Etherchannel is the only form of Etherchannel currently supported (and static link aggregation 802.3ad). The first thing you should know about vSphere Networking is that the out of the box vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) support 5 different teaming options, but does not support LACP (802.3ad) or Dynamic Etherchannel. This article assumes vSphere 4.1 or above, but even in previous versions Etherchannel may not be a good choice. If you want to know if you should use Etherchannel or Load Based Teaming, and why, keep reading. This is not the case with vSphere and of the five available teaming options only one provides failover only without any load balancing, the four other options all provide load balancing of multiple host uplinks. It is quite common for non VMware Admins to think the virtual networking in vSphere acts just like a normal server in which one uplink is active and the others are strictly for failover with no load balancing capability.

Generally the consideration for Etherchannel starts because people are not aware that Load Based Teaming exists as an option, they are not familiar with how virtual networking in vSphere works, or theyвЂ™ve just always used it. Etherchannel or Load Based Teaming has been a popular topic of conversation ever since Load Based Teaming was introduced in vSphere 4.1.

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