Nice configuration or not ? (networking)

[phil123]

Hello,

Is it a good solution to do that : What do you think ?

VM network, service console, vmotion connected to 4 physical adapters. on every Host ESX 3.5

[mcowger]

This is a bad choice- you have no isolation betwen your management, vmotion and guest traffic.

A better solution would be something like attached.

--Matt

[phil123]

Thanks for the answer,

I understand but if I have 4 adapters I could do timing between them.

My performance will be better with 4. If I use 1 adapter only for the console and one for the Vmotion my performance will decrease (only 2 for the VMs) ?

Is that right ?

[ctfoster]

Bad, unless you are running VLAN's for each of the portgroups and some advanced port aggregation and trunking on the switch/es. Some users do run in this way, which is were you may have seen it, but this simple config does not segregate the traffic.

[phil123]

I have only one Vlan

[ascari]

following best practice is good to separate service console and vmotion from vm port group. You can set two teming, one for sc and vmotion and the second for your vm.

Alberto

[ctfoster]

What you say about the performance is true with only 2 pNics. But remember all your inter VM IP traffics is kept off the pNIC''s - its only client and other external traffic it has to handle. Have you any evidence that that the system is network bound with 'only' 2Gb of bandwidth?

[phil123]

No, I don't think so

I know is best practice....but... what are the advantages to split ?

thanks for your help guys!

[jayolsen]

An advantage would be security, restrict access to the network your vmotion and service console use. I believe vmotion traffic is non-encrypted.

[depping · Accepted solution]

and unless you specifief each different portgroup to have 1 active and 3 standby nics you will never know where each type of traffic will run. in other words it could be that vmotion is going thru the same nic is a particular VM which can cause performance problems, and i'm not even talking about security issues.

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

[mforbes]

Your best bet with only four adapters is to combine your Service Console with your VMotion (as neither should have too much traffic) staggering an onboard with one PCI adapter. Then binding the remaining onboard adapter with the remaining PCI for your production network traffic.

That way your production traffic can be isolated from your SC and VMotion traffic and you should have double redundancy with having 2 adapters and spreading the load between PCI and onboard adapters.

Good luck,

Mike Forbes