What is VMware NIC teaming and NIC redundancy?

TEAMING

A  VMware NIC team use to load of traffic between physical and virtual networks among some or all of its members, as well as provide passive failover in the event of a hardware failure or network outage.

• Increased network capacity for the virtual switch hosting the team.
• Passive failover in the event one of the adapters in the team goes down.

REDUNDANCY

Where redundancy is used for VMware HA reliability.

Let’s take the example where, any failure between the host and the cluster can cause an unnecessary (or false) failover situation. Possible failures include NIC failures, network cable failures, network cable removal, and switch resets. Consider these possible sources of failure between hosts and try to minimize them, typically by providing network redundancy.