Advice on the best way to configure NICs and virtual switch in ESX hosts

[kcorum]

I am new to VMware and am implementing it. I had my training a few weeks ago, and now I am configing my hosts. I have 3 hosts, each has 2 NICs. There is a virtual switch that ESX creates when it is installed (vSwtich0). The books says that it is good practice to remove the VM Network virtual machine port group that is assigned to the default virtual switch and put it on another virtual switch so that you keep your management network separated from the vm network for performance and security. If I do this, all of my VMs will have to go on 1 NIC b/c I only have 2 NICs per host. I thought that I would just keep all my port groups on the default vSwitch0 and add my second NIC to it so that I could take advantage of the NIC teaming for redundancy and load balancing. However, I am unsure about the performance and security risks. Do you have any thoughts or advice? I could also create two virtual switches and put my VMs on one which would have a dedicated NIC, and put my service console and VM Kernal on another virtual switch with a dedicated NIC. However, in this scenario I have no fault tolerance or load balancing. We are a small shop and we will only have about 10 -15 VMs on each host. I do not have access to distributed switching b/c we only paid for Enterprise (not Plus). Thanks.

[a2alpha · Accepted solution]

Hi and welcome to the forums,

With 10 - 15 VMs per box and I assume production machines I would seriously consider adding an additional two NICs per host. You could then do something like:

vSwitch0 - vmnic0, vmnic2, vmnic3 - Service Console, VM LAN Network

vSwitch1 - vmnic1 - VMkernel

This would give you redundancy and performance for accessing your Hosts (SC) and also to all your VMs. The VMkernel would get a dedicated NIC for vMotion and could be on a separate network. It doesn't need redundancy really as if the NIC went down the only issue is you can't vmotion your VMs. In this case you would just move one of the working NICs across to that switch manually.

If you have to only have 2 NICs then I would suggest having one vSwitch with both NICs attached and maybe VLAN the VMkernel off. I would definately want the redundancy of having the two NICs together.

Hope this helps,

Dan