Book Image

VMware vSphere 5.5 Essentials

Book Image

VMware vSphere 5.5 Essentials

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (20 chapters)
VMware vSphere Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Load Balancing with vSphere


Load Balancing is the technique used to distribute network traffic across multiple network adapters, in order to divide the load on multiple network interface cards. There are four load balancing policies. These are:

  • Route based on originating Virtual Port ID: In this method, the physical NIC is determined according to the virtual port ID to which the virtual machine is connected. It depends on the power on cycle of the virtual machines present on the host and connected to the same virtual switch or port group. In this method, the load is distributed evenly, which makes it one of the most used load balancing techniques in VMware environment.

  • Route based on source MAC hash: In this load balancing method, the physical NIC is determined according to the MAC address of the virtual machine vNIC. This technique has a very low overhead, but might not be able to spread load evenly across physical NICs.

  • Route based on IP Hash: In this method, the physical NIC is determined...