vmotion and ft

[wb2]

I currently have a switch dedicated to vmtion with only 1 nic on it per host.  I have 2 esxi 4.1 hosts.  I'm currently reviewing the requirements for FT.  I'm not sure how many nics it would require.  I have plenty of nics.  How many is recommended for each?  Last week I was vmotioning about 5 servers at once and all of a sudden the last 3 failed and one host was not reachable for about a minute.  So it had me a bit worried.

[jamesbowling]

You would want to have dedicated NICs for both vMotion and FT.

[wb2]

Currently I only have vmotion setup.  I have a single nic dedicated to it on each host.  I have a network cable running from one host to the other directly without using a switch.  I'm thinking of doing the same for the ft vswitch.  Is one nic on each host dedicated to ft good enough?  Is there really that much traffic running across it?

[jamesbowling]

One NIC is plenty but you may want redundancy as normally recommended.

James Bowling

[idle-jam]

best practice is a nic for vmotion and a nic for FT. hence you will need 2 more. advise is to get a quad port nic card so that you have extras for other usage in future

[MHAV]

First of all the only way to get a networkcard sharing kind a thing is when you use Distributed Switches it doenst work with the regular vSwitch.

You need to have a seperate NIC for VMotion and FT plus a seperate NIC for both as Cold Standby if required.

To get VMotion fast you need to grow the bandwith on the VMmotion Network and the only way to get this done is using 10GEth.

That brings it up to a least 3 NIC (Console, VMotion plus FT) plus 3 extra for Failover.

Then you need some more for your VMs

Regards

Mike

[seamus19]

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