Q and A: I only have two NICs on my Hyper-V host. Should I team them or not?

Question via e-mail:

I am using blade servers for my Hyper-V cluster and I can only have two NICs per blade in this configuration.

I am considering two options on how to configure the NICs:

1)      Use one NIC for internal network and one NIC for external network, connected to the virtual switch
2)      Team the two NICs together and use the same path for all kinds of traffic

What would you recommend?

Answer

If you're using clusters, I assume you're concerned with high availability and network fault tolerance. In this case using one NIC for each kind of traffic creates two single points of failure. You should avoid that.

I would recommend that you team the two NICs, connect the team to the virtual switch and add a few virtual NICs to the parent partition for you storage, migration, cluster and management traffic. You can then use QoS policies manage your quality of service.

--> Please see the rest on Jose's Blog : http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2013/03/30/q-amp-a-i-only-have-two-nics-on-my-hyper-v-host-should-i-team-them-or-not.aspx