The load balancing and failover policies are chosen so the infrastructure can have an impact on the overall design. Using NIC Teaming, we can group several physical network switches attached to a vSwitch. This grouping enables load balancing between different physical NICs and provides fault tolerance if a card or physical switch failure occurs.

A vSphere Distributed Switch offers a load balancing option that actually takes the network workload into account when choosing the physical uplink. This is route-based on a physical NIC load. This is also called Load Based Teaming (LBT). We recommend this load balancing option over others when using a distributed vSwitch. The benefits of using this load balancing policy are as follows:

• It is the only load balancing option that actually considers NIC load when choosing uplinks
• It does not require upstream switch configuration dependencies, like the route based on the IP hash algorithm does
• When the route based on physical NIC load is combined with network I/O control, a truly dynamic traffic distribution is achieved