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pbalderos
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VMWare: Best vSwitch config for single 4 port NIC (two 1Gbps and two 10Gbps)

Hello Community Friends!

I am looking for some advice on a new challenge that I am trying to figure out. Here is the challenge:

I have one Dell R640 that will be used as an ESXi 6.7 host server. The issue is, it only came with one integrated NIC that has two 1Gbps ports and two 10Gbps ports. I am trying to be creative with how I will configure vSwitches for vMotion, VM traffic, Management traffic, and iSCSI. This is what I was thinking and please tell me what you all think:

Port 1 (1Gbps) = vSwitch0 and will be used for Management and vMotion

Port 2 (1Gbps) = vSwitch1 and will be used for Virtual Machine traffice

Port 3 (10Gbps) = vSwitch2 and will be used for iSCSI traffic on isolated 10gb switch with the SAN

Port 4 (10Gbps) = vSwitch2 and will be used for iSCSI traffic on isolated 10gb switch with the SAN

Also FYI -  This is the first of 3 servers that will be in a cluster. I am upgrading hardware and moving VMs from the soon to be decommissioned hosts to this new cluster.

About the SAN:

Dell Unity 400 with four NIC ports

Phillip Balderos VCP6-DCV
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a_p_
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Separating iSCSI traffic is definitely a good thing. However, having only two 1Gbps NICs for Management, vMotion, and VM traffic may introduce a bottleneck in production, and/or during backup (unless you're backing up directly from SAN).

You could use a single vSwitch (for redundancy reasons) for these 3 traffic types with Teaming & Failover configured in a way where Management, and VM traffic use vmnic0 (active), and vmnic 1(standby), and vMotion has the configuration the other way around, i.e. vmnic1 (active), and vmnic0 (standby). This configuration would avoid possible issues when vMotion runs, as it can easily saturate an uplink, but it would leave only a single port for production traffic.

If I were you, I'd probably try to get an additional 2, or 4-port network adapter for this setup.

André

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a_p_
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Separating iSCSI traffic is definitely a good thing. However, having only two 1Gbps NICs for Management, vMotion, and VM traffic may introduce a bottleneck in production, and/or during backup (unless you're backing up directly from SAN).

You could use a single vSwitch (for redundancy reasons) for these 3 traffic types with Teaming & Failover configured in a way where Management, and VM traffic use vmnic0 (active), and vmnic 1(standby), and vMotion has the configuration the other way around, i.e. vmnic1 (active), and vmnic0 (standby). This configuration would avoid possible issues when vMotion runs, as it can easily saturate an uplink, but it would leave only a single port for production traffic.

If I were you, I'd probably try to get an additional 2, or 4-port network adapter for this setup.

André

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scott28tt
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