vSAN uplinks - add vMotion traffic

[andvm]

Hi,

vSAN dvSwitch has 2 uplinks (1 active and 1 standby), can I add a vmkernel for each host mapped to a new portgroup on the same dvSwitch to be used for vMotion traffic?

I was thinking that for the vMotion portgroup in Teaming and Failover I would invert the uplinks i.e. set the active one to be the vSAN standby one

Let me know your thoughts as I want to place vMotion on the 10Gbps links but do not have the luxury to allocate dedicated ones

I think that making use of the vSAN uplinks could be a good idea if implemented safely/correctly, so let me know if you have any feedback so as to create the no/minimal impact to vSAN.

Thanks

[rcporto]

Hi andvm​

If implemented correctly it should not be a problem, I have seen many clusters sharing the 10GbE uplinks not between vSAN and vMotion but also for VM traffic.

The following documentation shows how to designing a vSAN network and talks about implement NIOC to configure shares and reservation for the traffic that is sharing the uplinks: Designing the vSAN Network

[andvm]

instead of NIOC (which I believe requires Enterprise Plus), I will probably hard limit the vMotion traffic from the PortGroup settings (Traffic Shaping tab)...

[sk84]

instead of NIOC (which I believe requires Enterprise Plus), I will probably hard limit the vMotion traffic from the PortGroup settings (Traffic Shaping tab)...

In you first post you mentioned that you are already using a dvSwitch with 2 uplinks. And NIOC can only be applied on distributed switches. Therefore the licensing question doesn't matter here because for distributed switches you also need an Enterprise Plus license.

Configuring traffic shaping on the port groups may work, but it's a hard limit. With NIOC you can configure shares which will only apply if the link is saturated. So, you are a way more flexible with this approach and you can better utilize physical network resources.

How to best distribute the different traffic classes depends on the usage. If you have a lot of virtual machine traffic and rarely vMotions, then I would put vMotion and vSAN on the same uplink and VM and management traffic on the other uplink. If the VM traffic isn't that high, I would put the VM traffic and vMotion together and vSAN and management on the other uplink. But in any case you should use NIOC shares for the different traffic classes according to the Design document.

[TheBobkin]

"Therefore the licensing question doesn't matter here because for distributed switches you also need an Enterprise Plus license."

Actually not necessarily - all licensing levels of vSAN come with vDS regardless of vSphere licensing level.

Edit: link to official documentation that states this:

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsan/vmware-vsan-67-licen...

Bob

[sk84]

Actually not necessarily - all licensing levels of vSAN come with vDS regardless of vSphere licensing level.

Ah, okay. I wasn't aware of that. Thank you for this info.

[andvm]

Thank you, applied NIOC for vMotion using dedicated vmkernel and dvPortGroup on dvSwitch used for vSAN. (100 for vSAN and 50 for vMotion)

Am also thinking of doing something similar for an NFS share/traffic.

thanks

[andvm]

Clarification related to this topic, the vSAN dvSwitch 2 uplinks are now split (vSAN portgroup has primary active/second standby and vMotion portgroup has secondary nic active and primary passive).

I recall that NIOC for the vSAN dvSwitch by default listed 100 for VM traffic, but in this case there will only be vSAN and the newly added vMotion traffic.

Should I change VM traffic to 0 so if there is a nic failure and eventual contention, available bandwidth is only split between vSAN and vMotion traffic?

Just worried that in times of contention bandwidth would be reserved for VM traffic when there will not be such traffic.

Thanks