We're looking to add additional bandwidth to a VM running on an ESXi cluster running 5.1. How can I team these within the VM? I suspect I need to add a second e1000 and then install some Intel software to team them. Any idea which version of Intel driver? Is there some better software to use?
EDIT: Sorry, neglected some information. The guest OS is Win2k8R2. The physical NICs on the host are 1Gbps. The reason this has come up is we are seeing the VM hitting near cap on the capability of a single 1Gbps link (Usually at 100-110MBps, bursting to 130s, but I think that may just be a UI math lie) and we're interested in seeing if adding an additional NIC in a teamed setting will increase the overall throughput.
Best Answer
Adding NIC teaming to your guest is not going to help if your host is not making the most of both physical NICs. i.e. if you add a 2nd NIC to your VM, but your vSwitch config is only using 1 NIC you will see no benefit.
You are much better off fixing your host so that it uses both physical NICs for your VM. When you do this your VM will use both NICs transparently (provided you use the VMXNET 3 driver!)
More details on setting up multiple pNICs can be found here: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004088