Vmotion and Iscsi San on same network, different cards

[stormlight]

I currently have my networks set up like this

service console and VM lan on sep pNIC1 vlan 1

vmkernel to san sep pNIC2 vlan2

VMotion on sep pNIC3 vlan3

For ease of administration is there a compelling reason not combine VMotion and the vmkernel iscsi connection to the same subnet? (they keep the seperate physical nics)

They will continue to be segmented from the other lan for security and have sep nics for perf. Any reason not to have 1 vlan for both iscsi and VMotion is one to chatty for the other?

I may switch the service console to another network at one point.

thanks

[weinstein5]

NO you can share them but I would still maintain seperate vlans to insure you segment the traffic -

[stormlight]

thanks.. i know i can share them i have tested it. Im more looking for some concrete reasons to segment the traffic. Its not like it will help my switch traffic since its all on same switch, but dif vlans. The only thing i can maybee see is the help of dropped packets on the vlan since it will have less traffic..but that goes back to point one. Its all grabbing data from the switches backplane no matter what vlan it is in.

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

The issue really is that there is enough bandwidth available for the vmotion event to occur quickly - so depending on the disk load on your iSCSI network could delay vmotion completion - that is why vmware recommends either having the vmotion network on its network or if it shares share it with something that is not network intensive -

[JBradford]

I'd have to agree with weinstein5. ESX doesn't care if everything is on just one giant VLAN. It really is a matter of keeping seperate either for performance or for security. If you're confident that your switch has enough bandwidth free, and traffic segmentation for security isn't a concern, then you can technically run them together. That being said, I'm not personally aware of anybody doing that in a production environment.