An architect is responsible for designing a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)-based solution for a customer.

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 and 9.0.2 Design Guides emphasize that NIC teaming is a critical design element for fault tolerance and redundancy. To avoid a single point of failure at the physical layer, VMware prescribes that:

“Each traffic type is spread across separate network cards to avoid single point of failure.”

This ensures that in case one physical NIC card or PCI slot fails, the traffic can continue to flow through another NIC on a separate card, maintaining network connectivity and host resilience. This guidance is part of Physical NIC Level Redundancy (NLR) design considerations, ensuring that no single physical adapter failure disrupts the ESXi host or associated management, vMotion, or vSAN traffic.

The VCF distributed switch and NSX overlay networks benefit from independent uplinks across NIC cards, providing enhanced resiliency for management and workload domains. VMware recommends Active/Active or Active/Standby teaming using policies such as “Route based on physical NIC load” across multiple NIC cards.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide – “Physical NIC Level Redundancy (NLR)”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design Guide – “Basic NIC Teaming and Redundancy Considerations”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 – “vSphere Distributed Switch Design Recommendations for NLR.”