Multiple NIC questions

[macpiano]

My server has 4 real nics and my new ones will have 8. Right now they are all just added in as regular nics. My questions are as follows:

1. Can they all just be teamed together as in a real W2k3 or 2008 box as I really am not concerned about anyone of them having priority?

2. Can one server have it's own nic if I desired it?

3. Is there a best practice or whitepaper on configuring nics?

4. I need to have it pretty vanillia anyways in case anything ever happens to my startup ESXi.

thanks for all the great help so far.

Gary

[marcelo_soares]

1. Can they all just be teamed together as in a real W2k3 or 2008 box as I really am not concerned about anyone of them having priority?

Yes, you can team all nics as uplinks of a single vSwitch.

2. Can one server have it's own nic if I desired it?

Hmmm... there are 2 ways of doing this: attaching only this VM to a vSwitch having as uplink a specific nic (easiest and suggested) or presenting the nic directly to the VM using VMDirectPath (in this case the NIC will be VM exclusive)

3. Is there a best practice or whitepaper on configuring nics?

I don't know any besides the regular VMware docs.

4. I need to have it pretty vanillia anyways in case anything ever happens to my startup ESXi.

Doing the teaming configuration you will have it pretty vanilla.

Marcelo Soares

VMWare Certified Professional 310/410

Virtualization Tech Master

Globant Argentina

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[macpiano]

Thanks, Being a newbie here I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

Gary

[sketchy00]

You might also find the following docs valuable. They will attempt to show you how to best handle physical NICs, vswitches, and portgroups. If you do it right, your hosts may have varying numbers of physical NIC's but it won't matter all that much, because your port groups and vswitches will all be set up in a similar way (with different numbers of NICs assigned to each vswitch).

The great vSwitch debate

http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/tag/vswitch/

Read all 8 parts. Then read 'em again. They are that good.

[macpiano]

Wow, what a dizzying array of options. The one I found most interesting was the link aggregation to the physical switch. That could help greatly with my backups which are on a different physical server as is my physical file server which is now going to 4.5 TB. I will as you suggest re-read probably several times. I knew there had to be something like this.

thank you very much.

Gary

[sketchy00]

Take a look at, in particular to Part 6 of that 8 part series, where he describes typical setups for ESX hosts when you have 4, 6, or 8 NICs on a host, and if you do have an iSCSI SAN (as I do), how to accomodate for iSCSI shared storage. Of course, none of that will make much sense if you don't have a thorough understanding of vswitches and portgroups, which is where the rest of the series of articles comes into play. If much of it seems odd and not what you are used to, you're right on track. For someone unfamiliar to it, it tends to flip everything you know upside-down.

Get your foundation right (vswitch arrangements, portgroups and their names), then you have have hosts that can have different numbers of NICs that have the same vSwitch setup, but simply different numbers of NICs assigned to each vswitch