Opinion on best way to configure networking on ESX 4.0 host w/ 12 NIC's

[UMSOM]

Hello...first off, I am fairly new to the world of VMWare...I am looking to be pointed in the right direction on how best to configure 3 ESX 4.0/4.1 servers w/ 12 physical NIC's each...note, we have the Enterprise Plus license of vSphere and are connecting up to an EMC iSCSI SAN (NS-120)...for example, how many ports to dedicate to iSCSI traffic, SC, VMotion, Failover, etc...also, should I use Jumbo Frames?  moreover, we are entirely a Cisco shop, so, thoughts on best way to aggregate NIC's (i.e. do Cisco etherchannel, LACP, etc. on the Cisco switch side?)...thanks for your help

[idle-jam]

here is a KB on sample configuration etherchannel and lacp. for 12 i would probably create two trunk. 6 nic trunk for VM traffic with VLAN tagged and another 2 for vmotion/ft, 2 for iscsi traffic, 2 for backup. this is what i would do. also it's wise to enable jumbo frames for vmotion and iscsi.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004048

[AndreTheGiant]

With a lot of NICs you can have several options.

For iSCSI/NFS traffic, this depends by your ports... Celerra have active/standy controller (usually)... so if you have 2 (for example) ports for this traffic, then it does not make sense to have more than 2 for each hosts.

With Enterprise Plus, consider to use a DVS solution for your network.

Jumbo Frames must be enable for storage traffic. It can be enable also for vMotion and FT (but I do not see much improvements).

With Cisco products Etherchannel is usual, with the IP hash team policy.

Andre