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Network Configuration Best Practices?

I am looking for best practices for switch configuration in

our esx environments.

From my research and experience I have seen best performance with flow control

enabled and 1000 full on the network side switches and jumbo frames, flow

control and 1000 full on the iscsi switches. I also manually configure all esx

hosts to 1000 full for consistency (although not always necessary I understand).

We connect to Equallogic arrays that by default take advantage of jumbo frames.

We use cisco switches in our environment.

Can anyone attest to these configs? Are there some documents

available where the suggested configurations are laid out in a single location

without having to skim through 200 page documents?

Thanks

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Chuck8773
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

That sounds just like my environment. All servers use a dual port Intel NIC to connect to two separate Cisco stacks. The two stacks have an 8 port etherchannel connecting them. Each EqualLogic SAN connects to each stack. Flow control, Jumbo Frames, 1Gbps, Cisco on the SAN side. Flow control, 1 Gbps, HP on the LAN side.

It has worked very well for us. We are starting to really push the limits of our configuration. 20 EqualLogic arrays gets pretty cumbersome to manage in our environment. Your mileage may vary.

EqualLogic has some good documents on best practice ways to configure things like this though. Log in to their support site to download them.

Charles Killmer, VCP4

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Charles Killmer, VCP4 If you found this or other information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful".
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