Hello,

However for security reasons you may wish to switch to the following:

1 pNIC for Service Console
1 pNIC for vMotion
2 pNICs for iSCSI (redundant)
2 pNICs for VMs (redundant)

You never want vMotion and SC sharing a vSwitch as these are the most security conscious systems on the network. Not only this, but your SC must partiticipate in your iSCSI network, which would mean not only would access to the SC grant me access to the VMDKs but also to the clear text memory image of the VM being vMotion'd to another host as well as access to any other iSCSI traffic. vMotion is a dangerous network to share even when using VLANs, I tend to keep to physical separation for this particular high risk network. Also, vMotion should be as fast as physically possible, tieing it to your SC can slow it down due to other SC requirements.

If it was me I would go for 8 pNICs for full redundancy and security. There is quite a bit of discussion about this in the Security and Compliance forum.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky, author of the forthcoming 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', publishing January 2008, (c) 2008 Pearson Education. Available on Rough Cuts at http://safari.informit.com/9780132302074