Network configuration

[jpoling]

I've seen several posts recently about networking configuration. I am in the middle of implementing four new servers in a brand new cluster. Unlike our previous cluster I have 8 NICs and the ability to provide redundancy for service console, vmotion, etc. A few questions in that regard:

• What is the best way to setup redundancy for the service console (with HA enabled)? Do I just add an additional NIC to the service console switch?

• When using multiple NICs for redundancy on a vSwitch, do the ports on the physical switch need to be trunked? Or can they simply be two different connections. We've previously always trunked the physical ports, but I am wondering if there is an easier/better way to do it?

Thanks for any insight

Jeff

[jonathanp]

Here we use 8 nics too and confgured like this

3 Different vSwitches

vSwitch0 has 2 vmnic and configured only for the service console

vSwitch1 has 2 vmnic and configured only for vMotion

vSwitch2 has 4 vmnic and configured for VMs network

the vSwitch's physical adapters are connected to the VLAN trunk ports of a physical switch, the ESX Server resolves VLAN IDs, distributes traffic to the virtual port groups and adds the correct VLAN tags to the outgoing traffic of the virtual port groups.

[azn2kew]

It really depends what types of network you're going to connect but if you can read this guide gives you details how to implement networking for production and DMZ as well. _infra_wp.pdf

You can use:

pNIC1-2->Service Console/VMotion

pNIC3-4->VM Network

pNIC5-6->DMZ Network

pNIC7-8->Backup Network or spare use.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[depping]

i tend to use the setup as Stefan described, most of the time with an active/standby approach for the SC/VM.

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

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[Texiwill]

Hello,

You really want the DMZ on its own set of ESX servers.... Its much more secure that way, but if you have to use it with your other systems. Then the described works fine.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

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

[jpoling]

Thanks for the feedback. . .for the DMZ, in our case it is a situation of what is best vs. what we are able to do. I hope to eventually get to a point where we ahve separate DMZ hosts. . .just not there today.