setting up vmotion with no switch

[wb2]

My vmware setup only has 2 vmhosts and 1 SAN. Instead of dedicating a physical switch to vmotion, can I just connect a ethernet cable from one nic in serverA to one nic in serverB? Can I do this as well if I have two nics available on each server?

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

you can use a cross-over cable.....

[wb2]

Is it true that 2 ethernet cables/nics won't provide any more performance. It's just for redundancy?

[mehul96]

Sure. ESX will not care whether hosts are direct connect or using switched network. As long as you configure the vmkernel IP stack correctly on both, it should work fine. Obviously, you will need multiple NICs on each if you want to provide network connection to VMs

Mehul

PS: yes, you will need a crossover cable for a dircect NIC to NIC connect

[mehul96]

If configured as a NIC team with appropriate policy (eg route based on IP hash), multiple NICs can offer better performance + redundancy