These steps will walk you through the process of creating a new vSphere-Distributed Switch that will be capable of multi-NIC vMotion. This assumes that you have two network adapters available for this new vSwitch:
- Open up vSphere Web Client.
- Log in to your vCenter Server.
- Navigate to the Networking section.
- Right-click on the cluster and select Distributed Switch, then New Distributed Switch.
- Call the MultiNICvMotion switch and confirm it's at the correct location. Click on Next.
- Select the switch version appropriate to your environment, then click on Next.
- Change the number of uplinks to 2. Leave the check next to Create a default port group, then change the port group name to vMotion-01. Click on Next. Click on Finish.
- Expand MultiNICvMotion, then right-click on vMotion-01 and select Edit Settings.
- In the VLAN section, change the VLAN type to VLAN and assign a VLAN.
- In the Teaming and failover section, move Uplink 2 down to Standby uplinks. Click on OK.
- Right-click on MultiNICvMotion and select Distributed Port Group, then New Distributed Port Group.
- Call the port group vMotion-02 and click on Next.
- Change the VLAN type to VLAN and change the VLAN ID to the same ID as step 9. Click on Next. Click on Finish.
- Right-click on vMotion-02 and select Edit Settings.
- In the Teaming and failover section, move Uplink 1 down to Standby uplinks. Click on OK.
Now we need to add hosts to the vSphere-Distributed Switch. Edit the switch at the host level and assign IP addresses to the port groups, then follow these steps:
- From the Networking view, right-click on MultiNICvMotion and select Add and Manage Hosts.
- Select the Add Hosts task. Click on Next.
- Click on the New Hosts button and add your hosts to the list. Click on Next.
- Check the Manage physical adapters and Manage VMkernel adapters tasks, then click on Next.
- From the NICs listed, select the two you want to assign to MultiNICvMotion and click on the Assign uplink button. Assign the first NIC to Uplink 1 and the second to Uplink 2. Repeat this for each host. Click on Next.
- On the Manage VMKernel network adapters page, select the first server and then click on New adapter.
- Choose Select an existing network and then browse to select vMotion-01. Click on Next.
- Enable the vMotion service, then click on Next.
- Set the IP address and subnet mask and click on Next. Click on Finish.
- Repeat steps 6-9 for vMotion-02.
- Repeat steps 6-10 for any other servers.
- Click on Next, then Next, then Finish.
- You can view the settings of MultiNICvMotion at the host level by going back to Hosts and Clusters. Click on the host, then go to Configure | Networking | Virtual switches:
Now you have a multi-NIC vMotion Network.