We are planing to implement VI3 with iSCSI.
We would like to seek your advice that whether 2 Gigabit NICs are sufficient for each ESX 3.5 Host ?
From our understanding, one NIC is used for connecting to the LAN and the other one is for connecting to the iSCSI SAN via a private LAN.
Regards,
6 indeed when using iSCSI.
Keep in mind that when a failover occurs STP kicks in so you will have to disable it or enable PortFast(cisco).
Your design is okay, I would go for an active/standby setup on the VMkernel / Service Console vSwitch! (vSwitch0) And use VirtualPort ID for loadbalancing on the others.
Duncan
My virtualisation blog:
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Not unless you dont care about redundancy.
Realistically, if you want decent separation and redundancy, you need 6 NICs: 2 for SC, 2 for iSCSI, 2 for VMs.
Make that 3 if you dont care about redundancy.
--Matt
As matt pointed out if redundancy is not important - particularly since you will have to share a nic for the service and vms -
Dear Matt,
Thank you for your advice.
We will use 6 NICs as you suggested. Just to confirm whether our interpretation is correct
1) 2 NIC - One connected to Switch A and the other one to Switch B
2) 2 NIC for vSwitch0 - NIC Teaming for VM
3) 2 NIC for vSwitch1 - NIC Teaming for VC Console and VMotion
Thanks
6 indeed when using iSCSI.
Keep in mind that when a failover occurs STP kicks in so you will have to disable it or enable PortFast(cisco).
Your design is okay, I would go for an active/standby setup on the VMkernel / Service Console vSwitch! (vSwitch0) And use VirtualPort ID for loadbalancing on the others.
Duncan
My virtualisation blog:
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
You might want to also consider doing some NFS testing, unless you are using hardware iSCSI initiators, you may find NFS outperforms iSCSI.
John