- Installed 3 new hosts – Dell R430 with 8 network ports each (1GB each)
- Shared storage - EqualLogic PS6100SX
- dedicated SAN with 4 nics from each host spread across two switches
- Hosts are running ESX Essentials Plus
- All three hosts are running 5.5u3
I have vmotion up and running. However I am disappointed in the performance. A very small vm (2 vcpu and 4GB of ram) that runs just our anti-virus software takes about 45 seconds to migrate. I figure if I needed to migrate all the vm’s off a host for some serious reason it would take far too long before the host was dead.
I am using one of the iSCSI vmkernel ports on our SAN for vmotion. This port is using jumbo packets and is limited to 1GB. I believe the poor vmotion performance is due to a few issues:
- Shared network traffic with the SAN. I am sure there is contention with SAN traffic. Not sure if jumbo packets is the best for vmotion traffic.
- Bandwidth being limited to 1GB. Not sure if this is as import as the issue above.
I believe I need to physically separate the vmotion network. The big questions is does this new network need to be running at 1GB or 10GB to increase performance. Of course 10GBase-T comes at a large cost but do I need to spend big dollars on:
- 2 port 10GBase-T nics in each host (I have room in each host for this)
- Small 8 port 10GBase-T switch
If I need a physically separate vmotion network I guess it will need its own dedicated IP scheme. We have 10.0.0.x for our devices network and 192.168.130.x for our SAN so we could use 192.168.140.x for vmotion
Before I start spending a bunch of money I wanted to get others that may be more knowledgeable with vmotion them myself.
Thanks for your time and help. I look forward to your comments and suggestions.
