Configuring multiple vMotion VMkernel port groups in vSphere 5

vMotion has been completely rewritten in vSphere 5, and several improvements to the mechanism have been added, including the possibility to saturate 10Gbps links when performing a live migration, as well as improved convergence in cases when virtual machine memory changes faster than the vMotion transfer rate. Complete list of improvements and best practices for vMotion in vSphere 5 can be found in this VMware document - VMware vSphere vMotion Architecture, Performance and Best Practices in VMware vSphere 5.

One of the improvements is also the ability to configure multiple port groups (which are using different uplinks) for vMotion, and the mechanism can now use them simultaneously in order to migrate the VMs, even in cases when only one VM is migrated. In this way, if you have a 1Gbps vMotion network between hosts, you can utilize multiple host NICs for vMotion migration and therefore benefit from improved throughput resulting in faster vMotion migrations (which can be very useful especially in cases when you need to e.g. migrate all VMs from a host in order to perform maintenance tasks).


Configuring vMotion to use multiple host NICs is very simple - you need to create two VMkernel port groups on a virtual switch with different IP addresses and in the appropriate vMotion VLAN, mark them to be used for vMotion (Edit port group settings -> General tab -> mark the Enabled field next to vMotion) and edit their NIC Teaming settings so that they use different vSwitch uplink as the active uplink.


For example, if vmnic0 and vmnic1 are the uplinks of your virtual switch where these port groups are located, and you created port groups vmotion1 and vmotion2, you would configure vmotion1 to use vmnic0 as the active and vmnic1 as the standby adapter, and configure vmotion2 to use vmnic1 as the active and vmnic0 as the standby adapter.


This is how your port group NIC Teaming configuration should look like on the port groups:

These are the two vMotion port groups on the vSwitch:

If you are using distributed switches, you need to create two port groups with the same uplink configuration as described above, create two Virtual Adapters for vMotion on every host and bind them to different port groups previously created on the distributed switch.


The procedures described are for the most common case when you have two uplinks on the management / vMotion vSwitch, but vSphere 5 supports using up to 16 1Gbps or 4 10Gbps uplinks for Multi-NIC vMotion in this way. If you have more than two uplinks available and configure more than two vMotion port groups, all you need to do is configure one uplink to be active per a port group and all the other uplinks as standby.


Detailed configurations steps and videos for setting up Multiple NIC vMotion can be found in this VMware KB - Multiple-NIC vMotion in vSphere 5.


One word of advice for the end - be sure to isolate vMotion in a separate VLAN/subnet than your Management / IP storage / VM networks if you haven't done that already per VMware best practices, since I've seen cases when performing a vMotion migration in vSphere 5 causes loss of connectivity to the hosts or between the host and iSCSI/NAS storage when the same VLAN/subnet and even port group was used for Management, IP storage and vMotion traffic.