While setting up a new ESXi host this past weekend, I ran into an issue where having the etherchannel up with multiple interfaces connected kept bringing my vSphere Client connectivity to the host down. I've seen and resolved this in the past by simply changing the vSwitch with the connected NICs to use the load balancing algorithm of &quot;Route based on IP hash&quot;.

From everything I've seen/read, this is required when using etherchannel to dynamically balance the load, aggregate the bandwidth, and provide link failover/redundancy at the physical switch.

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The issue I had this weekend, however, was slightly different. After I set the load balancing to use &quot;Route based on IP hash&quot; on the vSwitch the issue persisted. Long story short, for whatever reason ESXi had the Management Port Group on the vSwitch set to override the load balancing settings configured on the vSwitch-- by default, new Port Groups inherit the settings configured on the vSwitch, not override them. So after spending some time troubleshooting, the resolution was unchecking some checkboxes (in order to use the vSwitch settings).