Although presented as an option under teaming and failover, using explicit failover order is not a load balancing or distribution method. Instead, it uses a predefined failover order to use the active, available physical adapters in the event of a failure. When you set load balancing to use explicit failover order, all of the traffic is traversed through a single physical adapter at any point in time. If there is more than one active physical adapter, then it will choose the adapter that has been up and active for the longest time. For instance, if vmnic1, vmnic2, and vmnic3 are the three active uplinks, and they have an uptime of 48 hours, 32 hours, and 5 minutes, respectively, then vmnic1 with 48 hours of uptime is chosen. The logic behind such a choice is to select the most stable/reliable among the available adapters.