vmotion, v-fault tolerance, vcenter design considerations

[groque1]

Hi all,

Is it a good idea to seperate V-motion, V-fault tolerance and V-Center on their own seperate VLAN's or should I put them into one?

Thanks

[a_p_]

It' not only a good idea, it also is best practice or even more it's a requirement.

For Fault-Tolerance you should not only have a separate VLAN, you should also have separate NICs. For vMotion you need to have enough bandwidth, but you could use two NIC's for management and vMotion traffic and configure the NICs as active standby on the portgroups for example.

The above is meant for 1 GBit/s. If you are running at 10 GBit/s you may choose another design.

André

[groque1]

Hi AP thanks for your input but as of right now I only have 6 ports to work with

2 ports (1 to CoreA 1 to CoreB) are deidcated for V-motion and V-fault tolerance

2 ports (1 to CoreA 1 to CoreB) are dedicated for internal traffic

2 ports (1 to SanA 1 to SanB) are for SAN traffic

Would having Vmotion and Vfault tolerance on the same network port would that cause a bottleneck?

And in regards to a Vcenter server should i place that into the vmotion vlan or v-fault tolerance VLAN?

Thanks

[weinstein5]

You are also missing the management port that is used to manage your ESX host and it is to the this host that vCenter communicates - really as long as they are on seperate vlans they should be fine - as ap said it is best practices -

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[azn2kew]

The whole concept of using VLAN is for situation with limited physical NICs, and for your combination sounds like you need this much:

1. pNIC1-pNIC2->SC/VMotion

2. pNIC3-pNIC4->FT

3. pNIC5-pNIC6->whatever on this

Because SC/VMotion traffic not a lot and you can mix between two NICs and it still fine as long as you have seperate VLAN IDs for the traffic and all of them should be isolate for Management, Out of Band, FT, VMotion, Backup, DMZ, etc..

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[Alethay]

The best practice is a dedicated redundant pnic for FT but you can share with Vmotion port group sure that use a different pnic in the teaming properties as you can see here

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/fault_tolerance_recommendations_considerations_on_vmw_vsphere4.pdf (page 7)

Ale