vSphere 4 vMotion and NIC Teaming

In vSphere4 you can have only one VMkernel port for vMotion, so for network balance you have to use IP hash with Etherchannel
In vSphere 5 you can   have multiple VMkernel so you can balance vMotion  traffic across all NICs without any extra configuration on physical switch.

vSphere 5 vMotion and NIC Teaming

Among the many new networking features introduced in vSphere 5, perhaps one of the more significant improvements is multi-NIC support for vMotion.  This new enhancement will allow vSphere 5 to leverage multiple network adapters (in parallel) for a vMotion operation.  Previous releases, including vSphere 4.0 and 4.1, limited vMotion iterations to the bandwidth of a single network adapter.  Multi-NIC vMotion does not require any physical port configurations or load balancing option

Supported number of adapters for vMotion in vSphere 5 (per host):

1GbE – 16 NICs
10GbE – 4 NICs

Concurrent vMotions in vSphere 5 (per host):

1GbE – 4 vMotion operations
10GbE – 8 vMotion operations

Configuration

You will need to bind each VMkernel Interface (vmknic) to a physical NIC.

• Create a VMkernel Interface and give it the name “vMotion-01″
• Go to the settings of this Portgroup and configure 1 physical NIC-port as active and all others as “standby” (see the screenshot below for an example)
• Create a second VMkernel Interface and give it the name “vMotion-02″
• Go to the settings of this Portgroup and configure a different NIC-port as active and all others as “standby

When you will initiate a vMotion multiple NIC ports can be used. Keep in mind that even when you vMotion just 1 virtual machine both links will be used. Also, if you don’t have dedicated links for vMotion you might want to consider using Network I/O Control. vMotion can saturate a link and at least when you’ve set up Network I/O Control and assigned the right amount of shares each type of traffic will get what it has been assigned.

YouTube Video Guide to Multi NIC vMotion setup

http://youtu.be/7njBRF2N0Z8

Example Setup (Thanks to Scott Aisenstat)

http://virtualistmanifesto.com/2011/10/06/vsphere-5-networking-multi-nic-vmotion/