Advice on planning network for 6 vsphere hosts.

[mrnick1234567]

Hello

We are setting up a cluster of 6 Dell R610's to host a number of my companies core services - mostly lower bandwidth stuff like software licence servers, web servers, DNS.

I want to get an idea of the best way of utilizing the quad network interfaces on the Dells. We will be using vSphere Enterprise (ESXi) so we need to consider features like vMotion, HA, possibly a distributed switch, DRS etc. Our Datastore(s) will be on shared storage over NFS. (The Storage has multiple 1G connections.)

From reading the best practice docs it seems that 8 or 10 NICs per machine is common, with dedicated dual 1Gig trunks for Virtual Machine traffic, Storage traffic, vMotion traffic and so on. However over 6 hosts that's 60 NICs - (60GBits/s) which seems excessive and a hog of ports on our main Foundry switch.

As our network is currently very flat, I was thinking of trunking the 4 ports on each machine for all traffic, as our workstations and storage are all on the same subnet. I could possibly add a second network card to each Dell with a dedicated NIC or pair of NICs for management traffic which is a separate subnet.

Is that a viable setup in that it gives redundancy and bandwidth? Is there a better option out there?

Cheers

Nick

[idle-jam]

trunk would be the best option and an additional VLAN for the vmkernel/ft/vmotion and etc traffic ..

[AndreTheGiant]

The number of NICs depends by the number of the IP services that you need.

IMHO I suggest to keep the storage traffic isolated on dedicated NICs.

With 4 pNIC you have not much options if you plan to use also vMotion and maybe FT, so other 2 pNIC could be (in my opinion  a good choice).

Finally you have to consider if you have physical networks that need to be physical (for example a VoIP net)... in this case you need more pNICs.

Andre