The addition of the VM network on the same NICs as the Service Console is easily explained by the lack of some vendors providing additional network IO for the physical server itself.. Take the Dell blades for example they have an IO limitation of two network adapters if you are going to use a mezzanine for HBA in the 1855s and 1955s. Some times you are just limited and this addition to the feature set is a good solution for this limitation while still providing redundancy with the pNIC bond on your two adapters.

Not best practice but it works..

Here is a link for your second statement.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/588151

Help me help you by scoring points.

Hello,

It is possible to use only one pNIC for an ESX/VI3 server. It is however just not recommended. VMware never stated it was not possible. You can do this with everything on the same network, use VLANs, or even subnets. However I should say that performance and security will suffer.

Also in some cases it is necessary to place a VM on the SC network. I recently did this with a virtual FW so that the SC could temporarily access an ESX server on another network. This allowed us to copy over the existing VMs before shutting down the network. Once that was done, we shutdown the VM. This was a simple solution as they did not have this capability in physical terms. So yes, the automatically created portgroup does have some use. It is also a good place to put Administrative VMs that need access to that particular network. Perhaps your VC server? It all depends where the 'bridge' is between your production and Administrative networks. In my case they did not have one.


Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator
====
Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

Hello,

Also do not forget a pair of pNICs/HBAs for your storage solution. If its FC-HBA or iSCSI-HBA they are different, but iSCSI can also be used with pNIC and so can NFS.

For full redundancy and security of a system that uses iSCSI/NFS over pNIC with VM Networks you will want 8 pNICS. (2 for SC, 2 for vMotion, 2 for Storage, 2 for VMs)

If you add a DMZ network you will want another pair of pNICs.... I generally do not recommend mixing Production with DMZ VMs as there are issues where a DMZ VM can end up on a Production network and visa versa, but it is possible to do this within VI3. It depends on your approach to Security, and how much Security you really want, need, or require.


Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator
====
Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization