Best practice - vmnics

[Yps]

Hi, I got new servers, R720 with 384Gb of RAM and 8 Gbit Nics.

How should i best configure them for vSpehere? I need two for iscsi for one vswitch.

Should I put rest (6 nics) in one vswitch with both VMs, vkernel and vmotion?

I want to have two IP for vkernel so I can loadbalance vmotion on at least two nics (because of alot of memory).

Thanks for advice. Magnus

[tomtom901]

The best practice (in my opinion) would be to configure a seperate vSwitch for vMotion traffic and assign 2 nics to the vSwitch. Then create 2 Port Groups and mark one as active and one as standby (a bit the same as for iSCSI)

From the vMotion vSphere 5 best practices:

When using the multiple–network adaptor feature, configure all the vMotion vmnics under one vSwitch and create one vMotion vmknic for each vmnic. In the vmknic properties, configure each vmknic to leverage a different vmnic as its active vmnic, with the rest marked as standby. This way, if any of the vMotion vmnics become disconnected or fail, vMotion will transparently switch over to one of the standby vmnics. When all your vmnics are functional, though, each vmknic will route traffic over its assigned, dedicated vmnic.

Reference document: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmotion-perf-vsphere5.pdf