Fault Tolerance/vMotion

[Dryv]

Hi All,

I have inherited a cluster of ESXi servers running on rack mount servers. These servers have plenty of network adapters free in them (1Gb NICs).

If I was to do some re-arranging of the NICs and introduce FT (for a couple of critical VMs) could I:

- Dedicate a 1Gb NIC for vMotion

- Dedicate a 1Gb NIC for Fault Tolerance

What I'm trying to get at is, is 1Gb NICs for each of these traffic types considered reasonable? I dont have 10Gb NICs to play with.

[lvaibhavt]

Think from the design point to view --- if you keep 1 NIC to vmotion -- what if the NIC fails? Keep two NIC's and configure them as multi nic vmotion (I hope you are running esxi 5.x or higher).

For FT you can put 1 NIC that should be fine -- as this feature will come into play when the entire Host is down.

[trungminh]

Hello lvaibhavtlvaibhavt,

I had a server which has 8 NIC ports. As your point what i re-arrange the port for most effective?

I already setup 2 port and team for  Management Network, does it the best or not?

Any help is appreciated,

[lvaibhavt]

2 ports for management is very valid. Keep 2 nics for vm network. 2 nics for vmotion and 1 for FT.

Keep the last one handy.

[trungminh]

Hello lvaibhavt,

I used ESXi 5.5, as i know that the 5.5 version was eliminated the Console service port. So i plan use Management port and vMotion is on one as attached file, does it valid or not?

If i have to separate port for vMotion and FT, do i need to assign IP address for each port?

Any help is appreciated,

Best regards,

[lvaibhavt]

there are only two kinds of network traffic --- VM Traffic and ESXi (VMkernel) traffic. When you create a new VMkernel traffic you have to specify an IP everytime.

so you can keep vmotion and Ft on the same IP however I would recommend to seperate them.

[trungminh]

Hello,

Would you recommended the VM traffic need to Teaming port or not?

Thanks in advance.

[Dryv]

Hi Ivaibhavt

Thanks for the response, its much appreciated.

Yes I have enough NICs to provide redundancy across all my uplinks, so that will be a given.

I was more interested in knowing whether a dedicated 1Gb NIC for vMotion and a dedicated 1Gb NIC for FT is supported configuration.

Dryv