Adding Physical Parallel Port to ESXi 5.1 host

If you want to do pass through with every NIC in the box, what is the point of having the OS run on VMWare? Since there won't be any other NICs for other guests you might as well install it on the metal.

Edit: In light of your recent comments - Why not use vSwitches and tag the ports appropriately at the physical switch?

Edit 2: I'm doing this from memory, as I'm not in the office so bear with me. In configuration > networking > add networking. Then you want to add a Virtual Machine network to each of the NICs that you want. Each one will have a different name and you should name them descriptively (ie FW-Trust, FW-DMZ, etc). You can choose to tag the traffic there, or you can leave it untagged and just tag the ports on the physical switch behind it.

Then in the VM go to edit > Add > NIC and then in the Network drop-down you should see the name of each vSwitch that you created in the configuration tab. Just add as many virtual NICs as you want that correlate to the vSwitches that you created.

Q1: One vSwitch per vmkernel port is the usual way of doing it, but I'm not sure if anything gets jerky if you do it any other way. vSphere 5 has a pretty strict compliance test that you must pass in order to bind a adapter to the iSCSI initiator, and it could fail if you're using a single vSwitch. But these are just my thoughts, not actual facts :)

Q2: I also use different NIC's for each vmkernel, as I've seen NIC's go down before.. you really do not want to loose all connectivity against your storage.. but then again, the likelyhood for something like that to happen isn't exactly big. It's also quite common in FC enviroments to use dual single-port HBA's instead of single dual-port HBA's. Better safe than sorry?

Either way - you should not experience any performance issues since all modern NIC's have offloading built in. I would actually guess that you get better performance with dual NIC's, as you get different interrupts and a separate PCIe lane..