NIC Teaming and NIC bonding are two different things.

NIC Teaming uses one of two methods, failover, and load-balancing with fail over. With a team you do not get a single 2gb connection (with two 1 gb NICs). You get two pipes that act as one, but merely are load balancing the traffic over each NIC, and each NIC acts as a fail over to the other. If you transfer a 100 gb file, you are not going to get 2gb of throughput…you still only get 1 gb, but you will not kill the network performance because the second NIC is still available to service other traffic.

True bonding would be taking two NICs and bonding them together to get a single fat pipe. This requires the switch to support this as well. I have not seen much bonding in the server world…more done at the network level.

VMWare acts the same way. It is purely load balancing and fail over. Since VMWare is done at the OS level, you can mix and match different vendor NICs in a team. I have done this without issue. Just make sure they are on the HCL.