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amit40
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Virtual switch setup with Physical & inbuilt NIC ports ?

Setup

x3650 - server with two inbuilt ports

PRO/1000 GT Dual Port Server Adapter by Intel

??

I have total of four ports including the inbuilt ports and the ESX server host is stand alone ,please let me know if I can join all the Physical port to one Virtaul switch for bandwidth are better not include the inbuilt ports ?

\- I dont have any plans for having separate service console ports (Need to use max ports for bandwidth /teaming/failover )

Let me know which setup would provide the best performance ?

8Vm's will be on the ESX server

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frankdenneman
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Brain,

I've talked to Jacob Jensen at TSX in Nice and he said it was perfectly alright to team nics with different chipset. Better yet, he recommended to form a team between an onboard nic and a nic from a PCI slot.

This way you also protect yourself from a chipset failure aswell.

Is VMware going to include your or Jacob's advice in a white paper in the near future?

Blogging: frankdenneman.nl Twitter: @frankdenneman Co-author: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical Deepdive, vSphere 5x Clustering Deepdive series

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admin
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What are the on-boars NICs?

It is best practice to have all NICs in a team have the same features.

i.e. you would not want to team intel and broadcom NICs.

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amit40
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Onboard NIC -- Broadcom NIC's

Two External NIC's -- Intel

Let me know if I can join both for teaming

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admin
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It is best practice to have all NICs in a team have the same features.

i.e. you would not want to team intel and broadcom NICs.

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admin
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vSwitch0

2 NICs for Service Console and Inside VLANs (on-board broadcom)

vSwitch1

2 NICs for DMZ (pci Intel)

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amit40
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I got through some discussion forum ,that not to use onboard nics for Internal VLAN's ?

PRO/1000 GT Dual Port Server Adapter by Intel -- Is this the better option for the Internal VLAN's ?

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admin
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Not true. "BAD ADVICE"

Your best design is as I told you above.

If you want you can

vSwitch0

2 NICs for Service Console and Inside VLANs (Intel)

vSwitch1

2 NICs for DMZ (broadcom)

You will need to make sure you change the default NIC that will be attached to vSwitch0 during install.

Which usually is the 1st NIC on the Mobo.

frankdenneman
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Brain,

I've talked to Jacob Jensen at TSX in Nice and he said it was perfectly alright to team nics with different chipset. Better yet, he recommended to form a team between an onboard nic and a nic from a PCI slot.

This way you also protect yourself from a chipset failure aswell.

Is VMware going to include your or Jacob's advice in a white paper in the near future?

Blogging: frankdenneman.nl Twitter: @frankdenneman Co-author: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical Deepdive, vSphere 5x Clustering Deepdive series
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andy_mac
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I'd like to see an official line on that - I know it's possible to mix NICs in a team, but in all other OS that is generally considered to be bad form.

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admin
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I've tried this before in Dell 2950 servers as I thought it would provide resilience against NIC adapter failure, I teamed 1 port from the onboard Broadcom with one port from the Intel PCI card for each vswitch - but unfortunately I found that it caused switching errors.

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andy_mac
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Alex - What was the configuration of the team? What switching errors diid you experience?

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admin
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Route based on port ID, I had strange issues where intermitantly packets would get lost.

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andy_mac
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But it worked OK using either Broadcom or Intel?

How many physical interfaces were there in the team?

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admin
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Yes it worked fine when the two pNICS bound were of the same manufacturer (they were actually dual port adapters). 2 pNICs per vSwitch.

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