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There are several different load balancing options, and if you have a cluster with VMotion or Fault Tolerance, and if security or performance is a concern - and it certainly should be in a good design - then you'd want to isolate management traffic so the perfromance of your VMs isn't affected.<br />
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This is a very detailed guide (albeit for ESXi 3.5) that explains the intricacies of setting up vSwitches and port groups.<br />
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<a href="http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/files/2009/12/the-great-vswitch-debate-combined.pdf" rel="ugc">http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/files/2009/12/the-great-vswitch-debate-combined.pdf</a><br />

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There are several different load balancing options, and if you have a cluster with VMotion or Fault Tolerance, and if security or performance is a concern - and it certainly should be in a good design - then you'd want to isolate management traffic so the perfromance of your VMs isn't affected.

This is a very detailed guide (albeit for ESXi 3.5) that explains the intricacies of setting up vSwitches and port groups.

http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/files/2009/12/the-great-vswitch-debate-combined.pdf [http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/files/2009/12/the-great-vswitch-debate-combined.pdf]


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Out going traffic is load balanced by default &nbsp;However to balance the load of incoming traffic, you will have to create a ether channel on the Physical switch port. &nbsp;
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Out going traffic is load balanced by default  However to balance the load of incoming traffic, you will have to create a ether channel on the Physical switch port.  

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If you have four physical NICs teamed and connected to a vSwitch with 20 VMs, is the traffic truly load-balanced across all four NICs?
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If you have four physical NICs teamed and connected to a vSwitch with 20 VMs, is the traffic truly load-balanced across all four NICs?

NIC teaming in ESX/ESXi

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.