2 Nic teaming for esx public/Vmotion in same NIC

[navaneedak]

Hi,

My current sdetup is

3 ESX servers running with Hp Bl460c server. Each server having 2 nics. i have configired as 1 nic for the public IP address and another nic configured for Vmotion.

with this setup i dont have NIC failover. If my public network NIC failes then my ESX server will be down. so can team both 2 nics together and use PUblic and vmotion in the teamed NIC.

will it affect my performance.

Pls note than i dont have another nic...i want to use only 2 nics for this setup.

Any suggestions ????

[TomHowarth]

you can do this, however it is not optimal and you will need to use VLANS for data seperation

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[r_lam]

Why don't you create a vSwitch for you're network and a separate vSwitch for you're Console/vmotion network.

Running them on both of your nic's you will have both failover and separate the networks.

[rDale]

Can you do VLAN tagging on the Portgroups ?

[weinstein5]

a physical NIC can be assigned to a single vSwitch - like the others are doing use vLANs so you segment the networks -

[navaneedak]

Hi,

How to use both the nics for Vmconsole and vmkernel ???

will it affect my performace???

I have only 2 nics in my servers. i want to achieve the redundancy in nics

[Texiwill]

Hello,

If you can use VLANs do the following

pNIC0 and pNIC1 teamed to vSwitch0

SC uses pNIC0 with pNIC1 as its standby

VM Network iuses pNIC1 with pNIC0 its standby

vMotion uses pNIC0

However the above only works securely or at all if you support VLANs. Without VLANs, I would still setup one vSwitch with 2 pNICs and then use subnets for each of the networks but realize that this is extremely insecure.

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

[Rajeev_S]

Hi,

I use Blade servers as my ESX hosts and have configured the VM N/W and vmotion N/W on the same vSwitch with 2 PNIC's teamed. So i can get redunancy on PNIC level. I dont see any performance impact on the VM's and the netowrk utilization never crosses 8%. But i use different portgroups (vlan tagging) for security purpose.

Hope this helps.