Two vSwitch questions

[sjmh]

I've spent the last few nights trying to google the answers to these and I'm just not too positive that I have the right information. I even asked my VMWare training instructors and got shrugs.

1) Is it required that for every physical network your ESX host attaches to, that you have a separate vSwitch or can you have 2 vmnics on different physical networks attached to the same vSwitch and then use port groups to assign the correct vmnics to use as uplinks?

2) If your VMotion/Service Console/VM net traffic all happens over the same physical network and same broadcast domain ( ie - no VLAN tagging going on ) - is it still best practice to separate the VMotion/Service Console/VM net traffic onto different vSwitches? The separation of traffic would only be happening inside the ESX host - once the traffic got past the vmnic, it's all out in the same broadcast domain.

[AndreTheGiant]

can you have 2 vmnics on different physical networks

Not possible.

Think at ESX NIC as switch uplink (one NIC -> one uplink... and one NIC can be owned only by one vSwitch).

is it still best practice to separate the VMotion/Service Console/VM net traffic onto different vSwitches?

Not necessary if you have a flat network.

See also:

Andre

[sjmh]

Not possible.

Think at ESX NIC as switch uplink (one NIC -> one uplink... and one NIC can be owned only by one vSwitch).

I understand that one NIC can only belong to one vSwitch, but I'm asking about two or more physical NIC's on one vSwitch, but each NIC is plugged into a different physical switch.

For example,

Say NIC1 and NIC2 are physically plugged into dev-lan ( 192.168.0/24 ) . NIC3 and NIC4 are plugged into mgmt-lan ( 10.10/16 ).

Can I create one vSwitch ( or dvSwitch ) and attach all 4 ports as uplinks. Then create

vPortGroup-dev

vPortGroup-mgmt

And assign vPortGroup-dev to only use NIC1 & 2. Then assign vPortGroup-mgmt to only use NIC3 & 4.

Or do I have to create a separate vSwitch for dev-lan and mgmt-lan?

[AndreTheGiant]

but I'm asking about two or more physical NIC's on one vSwitch, but each NIC is plugged into a different physical switch.

Yes is possible.

Andre

[weinstein5]

yes as long as the physical switch you connect to has access to those physical networks/vlans -

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