ESX 3.0.1 Vmotion Network Config recommendation

[MilesD]

Hello,

We have some HP DL 380G5 server that have 4 network ports, 2 onboard and 2 PCI-e. We have 2 seperate cisco networks, 1 for iSCSI using 10.0.0 and 1 public using 192.168.70. At the moment 2 ports are configured as vSwitch0 (public) for the Virtual Machine Port Group and a SC. vSwitch1 is configured with 2 ports with a VMKernal for iSCSI.

If I also want to use VMotion/HA/DRS, then which vSwitch would you recommend that I put this on? All networks are running 1Gb full using new Cisco switches / blades.

Miles

[VirtualNoitall]

Can you get a couple of more ports?

If not maybe drop one of the iscsi ports for vmotion?

If you had two more ports you could use them for Vmotion and SC. Have them each setup in an active/standby config where the SC and Vmotion have their own active nic put use the other as standby. Then you have redundancy across your config.

[MilesD]

Yes thats an option and porbably preferrable, but would utilise a lot of the ports on the network switch that may limit growth down the line. And unfotunately I'm a little hesitant to drop iSCSI to 1 port to ensure we have resilience should one of the switches die.

If I had to chose between the 2, which would you go for? My inital thoughts are to put VMotion on the public network to ensure that iSCSI traffic is completely seperate. The iSCSI network will probably be more heavily loaded than the public vm traffic. What issues do you think this might cause? As anyone got this config running ok?

[VirtualNoitall · Accepted solution]

Hey,

Best practise is to have vmotion on a seperate VLAN and on it's own physical nic(s). It likely won't be catastrophic to have vmotion, on a seprate VLAN, on the "public" nics but could cause vmotions to take longer and worst case fail.

you could have public network active on nic 1 and standby on nic 2 then vmotion active on nic 2 and standby on nic 1. That way they would only be on the same nic if there was a failure. I don't think you want to mix iscsi and anything because there are settings you may want to make on the nics to tune them for iscsi performance.

All this is not a good practise but is doable.

Hope that helps!

[MilesD]

Thanks a lot, I will try to get the best practises in with vmotion on a seperate vlan... These ESX server's are our first, so best to start in the right direction. Thank you for your input

Miles

[VirtualNoitall]

Happy to help. Good luck!