VMware NIC Teaming - How to gain more than 1Gbit/s copy speed between two VMs?

Solution 1:

A NIC team does NOT provide any more bandwidth. A single network connection (like the one between your 2 VM's) will never use more than one of the possible NIC's in the team. The point of a NIC team is to balance many connections across the available NIC's.

With your chosen load balancing method (Route based on the originating virtual switch port ID) each VM will always use the same single physical NIC. From http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf

Route based on the originating virtual switch port ID — Choose an uplink based on the virtual port where the traffic entered the virtual switch. This is the default configuration and the one most commonly deployed. When you use this setting, traffic from a given virtual Ethernet adapter is consistently sent to the same physical adapter unless there is a failover to another adapter in the NIC team.

In this case even breaking up your file transfer into multiple, smaller ones will not speed anything up, as you are still limited to the same, single NIC.