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edutz1014
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vSwitch Design question

I am deploying 3 ESXi 5 host with two iscsi switches and a Dell Equallogic SAN. Each server has 12 --1 GB nics.  I am thinking of deploying the vswitches like this

2 nics for mgmt and vmotion--vswitch0

4 nics for vm network-vswitch1

4 nics for iscsi- vswitch2

2 nics for Exchange 2010-vswitch3 (2 exchange servers) Exchange only network--vswitch3

The SAN has 4 nics for iscsi traffic.

I am torn between using two nic for mgmt and for vmotion and adding the exchange servers to the vm network and using those 2 nic for vmotion only. Any advise would be great.

Ed

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scottyyyc
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Enthusiast

Looks good so far. Management traffic is very minimal, so it doesn't usually need to be segregated. You can, but unless it's a huge install, I probably wouldn't worry about it. The traffic that's most important to segregate (for security and performance) is vMotion and iSCSI - so I'd keep those on separate vswitches and have management sit with the VMs. Also, with vSphere 5, you can have multi-nic vMotion (with actual performance improvements as you add more NICs), so the more NICs to give to vMotion, the faster your vMotions.

Looks decent for the most part, though. I've done a lot with EqualLogics, so make sure you follow Dell's best practice docs. It's not enough to simply create a vswitch, assign a bunch of NICs, and call it a day. You want to create a eparate VMkernel port for each NIC, and assign only 1 nic to each VMkernel port. A couple other posts on this in more detail if you look at the history of my account.

edutz1014
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Enthusiast

Thanks Scott. I was weighling the benefits of dedicating 2 nics for our exchange servers vs dedicating 2 nic just for vmotion.

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