10Gb Ethernet Configuration

[Molly]

Hi,

We're moving to ESXi5.0 and using 10Gb ethernet. There's 4 ports in the box (HP), 2 * Flex10 onboard NICs and 2 * PCI NICs. Usually we would team the ports and seperate the management/vmotion traffic from VM traffic. Obviously this model is wasteful when you have 10Gb NIC's. Any recommendations on how to set up the networking on these new boxes?

Thanks.

[vJJSosa]

Hi Molly, i'm assuming that are you talking of Blade servers, are you using these interconnect modules only for Lan?

Regards

[Molly]

No it's a rack mounted DL380 Gen 8 server.

[Molly]

Sorry, they're actually called FlexFabric cards....

[vJJSosa]

I understand, the concept is the same than Blade Servers, the PCI nics has 10GB ?

[Molly]

Yes PCI NICs are 10Gb also. I need access to two different vLANs. My old hosts have 2 1Gb NICs dedicated to 1 vLAN (not much traffic) and 4 1Gb NICs dedicated to another vLAN, as well as vmotion and service console.

Obviously I don't want to dedicate 2 10Gb NICs to the vLAN that doesn't have a lot of traffic on it.

I'm thinking of assigning all of the NICs to the one vSwitch and using vlan tagging?

[vJJSosa]

I think that using all nics in one vSwitch is the best way if you want to use the PCI Nics in order to obtain failover in case than one type of nics fall(onboard/PCI).

Another scenario could be using PCI nics for backup traffic, and the LOMs (virtual nics) as separate networks, i mean, maybe you can use 8 GB for LAN ( trunk), 1GB por MGMT, and 1GB for VMotion... but always you need to use VLAN Tagging.

hope this help you

Regards

[EdWilts]

What we do is put all of the traffic into separate VLANs and then trunk to the host (we're using HP blades but the concept is the same).  On top of that, if you have a vDS configured (available with Enterprise Plus), you can load balance by physical NIC load.  We only use the 2 NICs and don't add any more and we never saturate them, even with NFS for all of our storage.