Hi,

Good to see that you intent to use two switches for your design. Especially HA enviroments should have redundancy in my opinion. Furthermore, why do you have different networking connectivity to different hosts? It is always a best practice to connect all ESX hosts in exaclty the same manner. I would suggest to use a single vswitch in your design, and use all available NICs to team up, all having dot1q trunks assigned to them. Then specifiy preferred paths over the various links. Make sure to at least give VMotion its own link in the preferred paths. After that you could simply remove or add NICs as required. This gives you maximum flexibility and availability.

There are thousands of other perfectly valid configs, which will work very well also. Its just a setup I personally like best...

Hello,

Use different vSwitchs for vMotion vs SC for added security and performance.


This works out quite well from a Security and Performance perspective, you will as a result have 5 vSwitches and that is a good thing. Using just one vSwitch would waste pNIC as more than 2 in a link for load balancing causes issues and the other 9 would be there for pure redundancy.

I like your network layout, Secure, High Performance, and clean.

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