I attended a VMware presentation and during the slides it was noted a practice was to not dedicate a physical NIC for Exchange 2010 heartbeat functionality. So today I'm trying to find out more information about that. The only information I can find about Exchange heartbeat not being isolated to dedicated NICs refers to "cluster in a box" configurations but in our case we'll use DAG members (MSCS) across ESXi nodes.
In our environment we have multiple ESXi 4.1 nodes to support Exchange 2010 SP2 mailbox role servers. As an example, we have vmnic0 & 1 on vSwitch0 and vmnic2 on vSwitch1 and another vSwitch for some NIC's assigned to vMotion. The vSwitches are on separate vLAN's on the physical hardware switch.
Should we dedicate NIC's on each ESXi node for Exchange heartbeat or is there a more optimal way?
