vmware ESX and NIC trunking/teaming

If you want your Virtual Machines to be in different Subnets / VLANs, you do not need to put your physical switch ports in Trunk Mode.

For example, if your VMs are all going to be in 192.168.1.X Subnet only, then simply create a new Port Group called VMs and assign all the 4 NICs of your Intel Pro 1000VT Quad Port.

You can configure all your NICs to be Active or designate some of them as Standby Adapters too (Standby Adapters will be used if any of the Active Adapters fail)

Please note that the speed and duplex setting of your NICs should be the same  at both the switch end and at the Server end.(1000 Mbps / Full Duplex I assume)

Never set the speed to Auto-Negotiate else the NIC Teaming can sometimes fail.

A small correction - "If you want your Virtual Machines to be in different Subnets / VLANs, then you need to put your physical switch ports in Trunk Mode."

So if i want all four nic to be grouped as a full 4 Gbps links, i just create a port group (in vswitch0 for example) and assign all nic.  But no auto-negotiate either in NIC or switch.
Is that right ?

I don't see a "port group"  But i see a NIC Teaming tab in th vSwitch properties and i could add other NIC there ?.  I tried that but it did not seem to work. It cut out communications.  Do i have something to set in the switch ???

You just create a vSwitch and add all the 4 NICs to the vSwitch.
Make sure that the 4 NICs connect to the same subnet if you do not want VLANs option.

ok it works.  But it seems that the 4 Gbps troughput is selected by the ESX for outgoing traffic.
For incoming traffic, it says that the load balancing is done by the physical switch.

I tried to put the 4 ports of the switch in trunk mode but it's not working.  I have a Procurve 2510G-24 switch

Any suggestion ?