VMware: VMware Networking Blog: Beaconing Demystified: Using Beaconing to Detect Link Failures.
Beaconing is one of those features that often confuses even the most experienced networking admin.
Shudong Zhou, one of our senior engineers, recently posted
an entry on the internal blog explaining how it works and how you might use it.
He gave me permission to cut and paste his entry. Here it is …Beaconing is a
software solution for detecting link failures downstream from the physical
switch.ESX provides a simple and elegant teaming solution. All uplinks
connected to a vswitch are assumed to connect to the same physical network
(same broadcast domain) so they are all equivalent. Users can configure a list
of active and standby uplinks for traffic to go out of the ESX host. If a link
fails, the adapter driver detects it and marks the uplink as failed and stops
using this uplink. Existing traffic will fail over to a standby uplink or
redistributed to the remaining team members.
