Port Channels, ESXi 4.1 and the Management Network

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Now that I have a few of our ESX hosts upgraded from ESX 4 to ESXi 4.1 I’ve noticed something about the Load Balancing policy on vSwitch0. Like a lot of people we have multiple GbE connections that go into vSwitch0 (at least on these specific hosts), as usual when you first install ESXi it will set the Load Balancing policy to be based on the Virtual Port ID.

Next I configured the other two adapters that are on this system into vSwitch0

Now I can see in the properties of the vSwitch that vmnic0, vmnic1 and vmnic2 are all listed as active adapters.

But when I go to Management Network it only shows two of the adapters as active and the third adapter is listed as unused.

In ESX I would set the vSwitch to use a Load Balancing policy of IP Hash to work with our port channel we have configured on our switches and it would also change the Load Balancing policy on the included portgroups.

In ESXi it changes the Load Balancing policy for the Virtual Machine network to IP Hash but it does not change the Load Balancing policy for the Management Network, this stays configured as based on Virtual Port ID.