ESXi data traffic between shared storage?

[klancy43]

Hi guys, I'm confused about how will the data/VMs move between shared storage and need someone to help clarify...

Assume that there's a datacenter with vSAN enabled and NFS/iSCSI storage mounted in a cluster, and typical data and VMs are residing on vSAN storage.

if i want to migrate data/VMs from this vSAN storage to the NFS/iSCSI, then,

which vmkernel IPs will be the source for this behavior???

is it vMotion or vSAN kernel IP as source and transmit data to the target NFS/iSCSI server IP??? or maybe it's other vmkernel IP in charge of such task?

🤔🤔

sorry for the stupid question🤔

[depping · Accepted solution]

SvMotion would use either the management interface or the interface you marked with provisioning traffic. So it depends on your config. you can of course easily check it by simply kicking off an SvMotion and then look at esxtop, that should give a good hint 🙂

[klancy43]

I just did some VM "change storage only" tests monitoring via esxtop and found that the management vmk seemed in charge of such storage migration tasks in my vsan cluster.

the esxtop network panel did show packets transmitted via management interface.

Also found some useful traffic information here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsphere.networking.doc/GUID-D4191320-209E-4...

no matter hot or cold migration of "change storage only", the management interface is utilized to transmit packets.