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rmustafa
Contributor
Contributor

vsphere 5 (License: standard) network management to get high speed

My question is which is better and my priority is speed & excelent bandwith:
iSCSI Ports and NICs on Separate vSwitches   or   iSCSI Ports and NICs on single vSwitch
I've 2 free NIC's for iSCSI 1 Gbps , and my priority is "speed"  then  "redundancy"
Apart from this question, I've 4 NIC's  in blade server, sharing in this way, will it be better or any suggestion ??
6 blade in a cluster having 4 NIC each,
NIC 1 (vmnic0): management network, vMotion         (because online shifting of Vm's will be used rare)
NIC 2 & NIC 3 (vmnic1 & vmnic2): iSCSI network      (Need strong & high speed connection)
NIC 4 (vmnic 3): VM network                                           (High speed connection is required for application)
My concern is to get highest speed.
Please suggest, Thanks.
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Virtualinfra
Commander
Commander

I would suggest make it this way

2 vSwitches.

vSwithc0 and vSwitch1

vSwitch0- with VMNIC0 and VMNIC1 ( active\standby configuration)

Management and vmotion- active on vmnic0 and standby on vmnic1

VMNetwork- Active on vmnic1 and standby on vmnic0 ( Note:- here you can make it as active\active also, so that the load will be shared across both the nic and speed performance will be good).

this way you got redudancy and also you have dedicated the nics to particular port groups.

vSwitch1 - with VMNIC2 and VMNIC3 ( active\active configuraiton)

iSCSI network - both nic are active, so that the load is shared across and its good for performance.

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Thanks & Regards Dharshan S VCP 4.0,VTSP 5.0, VCP 5.0
rmustafa
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks a lot, I got way now.

Regarding a iSCSI port:

I just wanted to know a difference between two vSwitches type of configuration where you have a separate vSwitch for each network adapter (NIC1 & NIC2 )and VMKernel iSCSI port pair in a 1:1 mapping

& one vSwitch type of configuration where multiple network adapter and VMKernel iSCSI port pairs sharing the same vSwitch

I suppose it need to be bind also with this CLI:

esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk1 -d vmhba33

esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk2 -d vmhba33

In your suggestion that "bind" is required for iSCSI port ???

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rickardnobel
Champion
Champion

rmustafa wrote:

I suppose it need to be bind also with this CLI:

esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk1 -d vmhba33

esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk2 -d vmhba33

In vSphere 5 you do not have to do the binding through the CLI, but in the GUI on the vmhba33 storage adapter, networking tab.

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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