Dell Management Console with R710's running ESXi 4.1

[FrostyatCBM]

Just completing setup of a new environment. Its small, just 3 hosts. I have a management network on a separate physical segment where I am going to be running vMotion traffic and where my vCenter server will reside.

Initially I wasn't planning to install Dell Management Console (DMC) however today I was wondering to myself whether it might be worthwhile. My new R710 servers have a DRAC port, so I suppose I could also connect them to the management network.

Is it safe to put the DRACs on the same network as the vMotion and vCenter traffic? Or is that asking for trouble? Given such a small environment (3 hosts) should I avoid the added complexity and steer clear of installing the extra managment software that would be needed in ESXi (Dell Open Manage or whatever it is) and is this DMC software stable under ESXi 4.1?

[idle-jam]

For ease, it's better to be in vCenter traffic. With that you can connect to your server console on your Local LAN rather than isolated LAN of vmotion. For our customer deployment anything that is less than 5 hosts would give additional complexity when used with DMC.

iDLE-jAM | VCP 2, VCP 3 & VCP 4

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[AndreTheGiant]

DRAC is a management interface with authentication and encryption.

So is correct to put with other management interfaces.

About vMotion I suggest to use a different (at least logical) network from your management network.

Andre

[PaulusG]

It is a good practice to seperate management traffic (like DRACs, switches etc.) from othe traffic

Dell's DRAC is besides remote access also useful for alerting via email or snmp in case of hardware failure.

Hope this helps.

Paul Grevink

Twitter: @PaulGrevink

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[FrostyatCBM]

I suppose I could further separate the vMotion traffic from other management LAN traffic, but this would mean losing redundancy on my NICs as I only have 2 I can use for that purpose. I could assign 1 to each and have them on separate physical switches I guess.

But does vCenter and the DRAC stuff really generate all that much traffic? I would have thought it was minimal.

[J1mbo]

I think the point with the management traffic being on a seperate interface is that if the physical interface(s) it is using are saturated, management access to the host can be lost. You can test this for yourself using iperf to a VM that is sharing the management interface's NIC whilst monitoring the host using the vSphere client.

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

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