ESX6 4NIC ISCSI Layout

[LordBadHabit]

Hi guys,

after fiddling around some time with Hyper-V (:smileyshocked:), I´m currently planning my migration from HV 2012R2 to ESX6 Enterprise Plus.

Setup are 4 HP DL380Gen9 with 4x10GBit NICs each. Storage is a HP StoreVirtual ISCSI.

I´ve never worked with distributed vSwitches so far as I didn´t have the license...but now yes, so I´m asking myself:

Should I reserve 2x10Gbit NICs for ISCSI in a separate vSwitch and use the other 2x10 for VMs, Management, vMotion + FT (which we are going to use), or would it be possible (and recommendable) to put all 4 NICs in one distributed vSwitch without an LAG together with NIOC + LBT, so use all interfaces for everything, of course separated by VLANs?

Most of the docs + Best Practices I find is for older version but since vmware has done something here in v6, what would you recommend?

Many thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Regards,

LordBadHabit

[virtualg_uk]

Depending on your storage bandwidth requirements the general trend (specifically with hyper-converged infrastructure) is to add all the pNICs available onto the same DvSwitch and utilize NIOC, LBT etc as you suggest.

There is a great blog post over here regarding this setup: Virtualization: Resistance Is Futile: vSphere 5 Host Network Design - 10GbE vDS Design