Best practices for simple network

[netman86]

Hello!

I'm retrofitting a vmware farm and have some questions about networking best practices.

Right now, I have a handful of hosts with four nics each. All four nics are added to vswitch0, and nics 0,1 go to switch A and 2,3 go to switch B. The two switches are trunked together at 4gbps.

What I'd like to do is enable vmotion so we can move VMs between hosts without shutting them down.

It looks like I can very easily just tell vmware to use vswitch0 for this- but I'm worried that doing so might cause issues for some of the other networking activities going on with various VMs.

Does it make more sense to make a vswitch1 and move two of the nics (one from each switch) to it, and use this switch for vmotion, or is running vmotion over the same network interfaces for regular traffic not an issue?

[Kauy]

Hey!

It is definitely recommended having a dedicated interface for Management operations (Including VLAN). It's also strongly recommended to have an dedicated interface for vMotion traffic (Including VLAN). You might separate this traffic in a different vSwitch to easier the management tasks.

The production NICs must be on the same vSwitch to provide failover configurations, but connected to different physical switches in order to have better resiliency.

Here you can find some recommendations about setting up vMotion interfaces.

[markdjones82]

Since they are only 1 GB, I would use 1/2 for MGMT and VMotion and 3/4 for the VM traffic.  If you had 10 GB links I wouldn't be so concerned.

You could put them all on 1 vswitch, but then you would have to set the active vnics per port group so having the 2nd vswitch does make it a little easier. 

If you found this helpful please mark so.

[vfk]

Frank Denneman has a good blog posts on designed vmotion network vMotion - frankdenneman.nl