v-switches and sbs

[enkidoe]

i am going to migrate a small sbs environment. 1 new sbsserver and maybe 2 applicationservers.

i dont need a management switch. But how about the rest; should i put all the servres on 1 switch or should i split them? And what about the conenction to the storage? the storage is going to be iscsi; do i need to create  a v-scwitch for the iscsi as well?

[AndreTheGiant]

You can use a single vSwitch

I don't know which version of SBS are you talking about, but from 2008 it works on a single network, so is quite simple to configure the network part.

[enkidoe]

am going to use 2011.

So, i can use the connection to the nas  and the connection to the servers on 1 single switch?

[a_p_]

Even though this might work with a single vSwitch and maybe some VLANs to separate VM and iSCSI traffic, I'd recommend you start with 4 NICs in the host, create 2 vSwitches, one for Management and VM traffic and one dedicated for iSCSI. This way you can separate traffic, avoiding possible issues and have full redundancy at the low cost of a few additional NICs.

André

[enkidoe]

thanks André.

Virtualizing a sbs environment is new. SO, if you can give me some tips for designing(and more) that would be really apreciated.

Regards,

Dre

[a_p_]

With the size of the environment you mentioned (1 SBS, 2 application servers) I don't think there is much you need to consider regarding performance and availability. For the network setup it should be sufficient to configure the two vSwitches as mentioned. For how to setup the iSCSI network, I'd suggest you check whether there's a best practice paper from the storage vendor. Regarding disk setup, I'd recommend a hardware RAID controller with battery-buffered write cache which allows write-back mode and - in case of a RAID5 setup - 4 or more HDDs.

If you have specific configuration questions, please don't hesitate ask and provide some information about the hardware you are going to use.

André

[enkidoe]

ok, many thanks for the advice and reply.

[srnhpp · Accepted solution]

                               

You can use single switch and make sure that Vswitch port are correctly configure VLAN/trunk/access port.