standard vswitch vs dvs for vmotion vmkernel

[best1980]

Hi All,

i'm studyng and making some labs about standard vswitch and dvs. I have a question about their use.

I know that it's useful the use of dvs for share the same common topology network (vlans, etc) betweend several ESXi. But regarding the standard vswitch and its vmkernel of vmotion network or storage network, what is the correct procedure? for Vmotion or storage switch is it better to use standard switch or vds? It makes sense to use vmotion vmkernel in vds? or  not?

regards

[coolcrushier]

Hi,

The difference between standard(vSS) and distributed(vDS) switch only few but very important. Distributed switch is only available from the version Enterprise plus version of vsphere. With vDS you can manage the networking under vCenter. IF you are creating a vSS you need to replicate the settings among the ESXi hosts manually but vDS you can create it under vCenter->Networking and add the hosts to it to which the settings will be replicated automatically. The vMotion and management activities can be performed in both the switches. For studying purpose Standard switch will be enough. Below are the differences between two types of switches.

vDS:

Inbound and Outbound traffic shaping

Centralized unified management interface through vCenter

Supports Private VLANs

Provides potential customization of data and control panels

vSS:

Only outbound traffic shaping

No PVLAN support

No centralized management

[rcporto]

It depends... if you have sufficient uplinks to create multiple virtual switches with redundancy, you may try create a isolated vSwitch only to vMotion, but if this is not the case, you can put the vMotion VMkernel on the same vDS used by the virtual machine, but remember to create a separated Port Group and assign a different VLAN just to make sure the vMotion traffic is isolated from the virtual machine traffic.

And remember, if you decide create more virtual switches and standard switches instead of distributed switch, the management of your virtual network will increase and complexity and you will loose the benefits of distributed switch and central management.

[best1980]

Thnaks to all for the quick answers! 🙂

another question, in production environment, usually, the vmotion vmkernel is associated to a standard switch or the best practise is to link the vmotion vmkernel to distributed switch? I don't have experience in production environement so i ask if the distributed switch is used only for vms or even for other internal services like vmotion or iscsi storage...

best regards

[rcporto]

Any type of traffic can use vDS, because of this I will recommend you put the vMotion VMkernel inside the vDS too, and if you are worried about the impact of vMOtion traffic on virtual machine traffic, you can always use the NIOC to make sure thing works like expected.

See this paper about vDS best practices: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsphere-distributed-switch-best-practices.pdf