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cngoh
Contributor
Contributor

ESXi 4 virtual networking best practise

Hi,

Need all of your valuable advise on the virtual networking configuration on NFS & VM.

For NFS, 2 NICs in a vSwitch with IP hash configuration.

For VM, 4 NICs in a vSwitch with IP hash configuration.

Please refer to pic1 for more details

Questions:

1] Should I use virtual port ID or IP hash configuration? Which one is better? In term of redundancy and performance.

2] For NFS, should I create additional NFS VMkernel? Current configuration is only 1 NFS VMkernel.

3] For the failback option, should I set to yes or no? Please refer to pic2 for more details.

For example, assume that two vmnics: vmnic0 and vmnic1.

a) Failback set to Yes.

After vmnic0 fails, traffic is sent to vmnic1.Whenvmnic0 becomes available, this traffic is reassigned to vmnic0.

b) Failback set to No.

After vmnic0 gets linkup again, the NIC is still kept inactive up until the currently active vmnic1 fails. I'm no really clear about this statement. Does it mean if vmnic0 is recover, the status is up but inactive. What does it mean inactive? This vmnic0 will not serve for any network traffic? How to make it active?

Any other recommendation on my current configuration is welcome.

Thanks.

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cngoh
Contributor
Contributor

Additional info:

NFS & VM is used at the same network (10.3.100.x). No plan to separate into different network.

Thanks.

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Have a look at:

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
beckham007fifa

No need of creating 2 vmkernal portgroups, NFS,SCSI, vmotion should be in VMkernal portgroups. This wll be best practice if you are looking for.

Regards, ABFS
cngoh
Contributor
Contributor

But I can see there is some configuration with 2 VMkernel ports for NFS. Any reason?

Please refer to pic3.

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beckham007fifa

yeah, you can do this as well. But as per the best practice. I believe there should only 3 portgps config

Regards, ABFS
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