Virtual Networking

[Gmurisonapd]

I am not a guru nor am I a newb, but I do have some questions about how I "should" setup my networking. Alot of questions, but I appreciate the feedback!

My company recently upgraded from ESXi to ESX/VI3 Enterprise and also purchased a NETAPP Filer with NFS support.

Since we are a small shop (2 hosts <20 VM's), I have chosen to go down the NFS road, disk space is also an issue.

I have setup a dedicated vSwitch0 for the Service Console for management. vSwitch1 is dedicated to the production VM network. vSwitch2 is dedicated the NFS traffic. And vSwitch3 is for internal only traffic.

Due to buisness mandate the Production and NFS IP schemes have to be separated into 10.x.x.x and 172.x.x.x class subnets. The only way I could get an IP assigned to vSwitch2 ports was to add a Service Console port to the vSwitch, is this the only way to get NFS to work given the requirements?

I also want to setup vMotion later, so my question is should I isoloate the vMotion traffic away from the IP Storage VSwitch?

FYI I also plan purchase additional nics to provide load balance and redundancy.

Thanks.

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Forums - First off for NFS ac cess the Service Console does not need to see the NAS/NFS only the VMkernel port and from your diagram it looks like it is configured approriately with the right IP address in 172.x.x.x subnet - For VMotion ideally if you could use VMNIC3 that would be great - the VMotion network is rather simple - you will just need to define a vmkernel port with an IP address and eith connect the two host via a crossover cable or to a small 1 GBig wortkgroup switch -

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[madda]

The vSwitch used for NFS should have a VKernel port group created for it, so that it has a seperate IP address from the service console, otherwise you are just giving an additional IP for the SC, which is good for failover reasons but not for NFS.

I haven't done much with vMotion on NFS, so I can't say if you are required to seperate the normal IP NFS traffic from the vMotion traffic, but seperating them means they won't be affected by each others bandwidth limitations.

-

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Mark Atherton

[JasonVmware]

In a 4 NIC server I typically set up my virutal switching along these lines:

vswitch0

Service Console Port Group - pNic0

Vmkernal Port Group - Vmotion - pNic0

Vmkernal Port Group2 - Storage - pNic1

vswitch1

VM Network Port Group - pnic2

VM Network Port Group2 - pnic3

in vswitch 0 pNic0 is fialover for pNic1 and pNic1 is failover for pNic0

in vswitch 1 leave all failover / load balancing to defaults which is Port ID based load balancing.

In your case on vswitch1 you could have:

Production Port Group - pnic2

Internal Port Group - pnic3

Then get pNic2 to failover for pNic3 and pnic3 to failover for pnic2 or keep them in an active active setting with the default load balancing.

Essentially if you want to keep the VM Network on 1 port group you can, it all depends on how much seperation you like.

If you have any questions please let me know,

Hope this helps

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Check out my Topology Blogs on the best ways to setup your network based on the number of pNICs you have. These apply to ESX and ESXi.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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