Although VMware supports both 1-Gb and 10-Gb Network Interface Cards (NICs) for vSAN network traffic in hybrid configurations, VMware highly recommends that 10-Gb be used for provider environments. (For all-flash configurations, 10 Gb is required.) Multicast communication is a requirement and one thing to keep in mind is that some 10-Gb switches have better performance than others, even though the feature sets are seemingly identical.

NIC teaming is recommended for availability, but does not provide load balancing. vSAN network traffic has not been designed to load balance across multiple network interfaces when these interfaces are teamed together.

Jumbo frames can reduce CPU utilization and improve throughput, however, both gains are minimal, because vSphere already uses TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) and Large Receive Offload (LRO) to deliver similar benefits. However, if jumbo frames are already enabled on the network, the recommendation is to move forward with jumbo frames enabled for vSAN deployment.