One Vswitch or two?

[moshker]

When I first setup my ESX environment I had 6 nics.

I allocated them as follows:

vswitch0 - vm network (two nic ports) + cos

vswitch1 - vmkernal for iscsi, nfs, and vmotion (two nic ports) + cos

vswitch2 - dmz network (two nic ports)

Now I have two additional nic ports and I'm trying to decide how/where to put them. I'm seriously considering just adding them to vswitch1. Our network operations people will not vlan or give us a separate physical network for anything, so don't ask about that. We are working with management to explain why this is important, hopefully we'll see some change but it won't be for at least 9-12 months.

I've read a bit about load balancing in VI. Right now we are using load balancing based on Port ID. I think I understand this for traffic originating from the vm's, but not for vmotion, iscsi, nfs traffic. Are all the vmdk nfs traffic using one nic? Does a vmotion use the least loaded adapter in the port group?

Should I just look at our ethernet utilization charts and simply add nics to the vswitches with the most traffic?

Thanks in advance

Oscar

[thickclouds]

This is what has worked for me for years.

vswitch0 (service console and vmotion) (2 x GigFull)

vswitch1 (guest network traffic) (2 x GigFull) (use vst for vlan tagging)

vswitch 2 (nfs/iscsi) (2 x gigfull)

vswitch 3 (backup) (2 or 1 x gigfull)

Note: Always provide physical nic redudancy in a vswitch to prevent vswitch failure when nics fail

[mike_laspina]

Hello,

You have configured the original configuration quite well. The most effective place to add the new nics will be in the area of iSCSI/NFS and Vmotion.

Teaming works the same for iSCSI/NFS and Vmotion.

You could separate Vmotion or create a team of 4 and vlan it for traffic control.

[Jae_Ellers]

Separate vmotion from storage.

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[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I back up Jae. Separate vMotion from Storage. Consider this.... If you have a vMotion of all your VMs, this will impact your iSCSI/NFS performance. This will happen if you go into Maintenance mode and have HA/DRS. Or if you want to bring the system down for other maintenace, you may do vMotion by hand. So this will be your biggest win. You really do not want TWO intensive networks on the same links.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[thickclouds]

I agree - keep vmotion and storage seperate. If you need throughput add to the storage network but consider other bottlenecks in the network that may exist.

[bggb29]

vmotion is run in clear text and should always have it's own network.

Can you add a additonal nic for it ?

if not try adding another switch and using 1 nic for console using vmotion nic as a standby then use a vwsitch for vmotion and add the console

nic as standby. Now you have redundancy for vmotion and cos. You will accomplish redundancy and failover.

[mike_laspina]

The original post indicates that the network group will not allow a physical separation and not allow VLANs so the security points are mute.

We all know this is not good practice.

What the post is asking about it outside of that context.

So under the current constraints his options are to separate VMotion (best case) or create more bandwidth where it is needed the most and maybe get a vlan if they can be slowly convinced.

Hopefully at some point the network group will be able to handle a more complex configuration and do it properly.