Additional service console network to avoid HA isolation

[Anthony82]

Hi!

I am designing a new solution and want the best possible security concerning HA and a possible isolation. I was thinking that the best would be to add an additional SC on another vSwitch and use a separate physical uplink (to another switch). I read that the primary SC's default gateway is the default target for heartbeat-communication, but I also read that I could use das.isolationaddress1-10 on my HA cluster to define addtional test-points. My plan was to use a separate physical switch for a dedicated vmotion and secondary SC network. The switch I had in mind doesn't have an IP address and this leads me to my question. What can I use with my das.isolationaddress on my HA cluster. If I just define one of the extra SC's IP addresses then one of the server will never loose connectivity to the network as it owns the IP itself or what?

I guess I will have to buy a manageble switch for my dedicated vmotion/sc network in order to have an IP to send my addtitional heartbeat to. Don't you think?

THanks in advance,

Jonatan

[Texiwill]

Hello,

You do not need a secondary vSwitch to get this to work. To get redundancy for the SC, just add another pNIC to the vSwitch it is on. I.e.

2 pNIC for SC on vSwitch0. Each pNIC going to different pSwitches

2 pNIC for vMotion on vSwitch1. Each pNIC going to different pSwitches

etc.

More than one vSwitch for the SC will not really affect HA much, but it is a bit of overkill and means you have to maintain more IP for the SC.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354, As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization