Remedial Question on Network Basics

[AustinPowers]

Supporting an existing deployment w 4 ESXi 3.5 hosts, an iSCSI SAN, a physical tape server, a physical VC server, and two trunked Cisco switches. Current configs show VLANs and subnets for iSCSI, LAN, and VMotion/Svc Console. Current Tape and VC servers are configured w sufficient NICs for redundant connections to each of the three subnets.

I am deploying two new physical servers to replace Tape and VC. And after that is done I plan to replace the ESX 3.5 on each host w ESXi 5.5. Which subnets do Tape and VC actually need to connect to? Tape doesn't really need a connection to iSCSI to back up VM's, or a connection to the VMotion subnet, does it? Does it really only need to connect to the LAN? And with VC, it also does not need a connection to iSCSI, does it? VC just needs to get to VMotion subnet and to LAN subnet, correct?

[weinstein5]

Your VC server will need to have address on you Service Console subnet and LAN subnet - this will allow VC to communicate to the ESXi hosts and for you able to connect the VC server - however is you can route to the Service Console network from you LAN than you will not need the VC server to have a LAN IP.

Tape server will depend on what type of back up software you are using and how you do your backups -

[AustinPowers]

Thx. You mean just add a second IP address for the Service Console subnet to the LAN NIC?

Backups are by virtual machine, thru vCenter with Backup Exec & VMware agent.

[weinstein5]

You could do that or if you are able to route between your LAN and Service Console subnets then you will not have to do that -

I am not sure about your backup solution - you will have to check with Backup Exec and see what components need to communicate - I would assume it will need to communicate at a minimum to vCenter -