Vmotion On the Management Network Interface

[gobigblue]

Hey all

I have a question regarding enabling/running Vmotion across the management network interface. Is it just best practice to have a seperate vmkernel interface dedicated for Vmotion or is there an actual technical reason why Vmotion will not work over the Management interface?

Thanks in advance

[logiboy123]

Putting vMotion on the Management interface means that you can hit a situation where your network is saturated with vMotion traffic and vCenter to ESX communication gets interfered with.

Check out the following article for more information around setup and configuration details;

http://www.kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vsphere-host-nic-design-6-nics.html

Regards,

Paul

[gobigblue]

Thanks for the quick reply Paul.

So just make sure we are on the same page, there is no technical reason why it will not work. There is only the "potential of network traffic on the link getting very busy and vcenter may have a problem with it?

[logiboy123]

Your line of questioning scares me.

It is not best practise to put Management and vMotion traffic on the same logical network or have them share the same pNIC.

Having said that I did a configuration for client once that only had two NIC's per server and these two NICs provided Management, vMotion and VM Networking. To achieve this it was configured as such;

vSwitch0

vmnic0 - Management / Active - vMotion / Standby - VM Networking / Active

vmnic1 - Management / Standby - vMotion / Active - VM Networking / Active

This way Management and VM Networking were less impacted by a vMotion event then they otherwise would be. This was not an ideal way to do it but better then any of the alternatives that I could think of. I advised them to obtain another 2 NICs per host and then migrate VM Networking traffic to the two extra NICs so that;

vSwitch0

vmnic0 - Management / Active - vMotion / Standby

vmnic1 - Management / Standby - vMotion / Active

vSwitch1

vmnic2 - VM Networking / Active

vmnic3 - VM Networking / Active

Regards,

Paul