Pls suggestion on Vmswitch

[tiger74]

Hello all,

I plan to use two IBM 3950 in cascade mode, meaning the two servers will merge into one big resource.

In total there will be 8 NICs.

I'm hesitate in choosing the design of the Vmswitch:

1. Should I create just one Vmswitch consisting all 8 Nics?

2. Or, I create 2 Vmswitches with each consisting 4 Nics.

What is the benefit regarding througput and loadbalancing/failover?

Thank you.

[MR-T · Accepted solution]

I'd usually break the NICs into 3 categories.

Service Console, VMotion & VM networks.

For redundancy, I'd then have a pair of cards assigned to each vswitch.

2 cards should be sufficent for the VM network provided you're using VLAN tagging. If you require multiple VLANs and don't use tags then you might need to consider seperate vswitches for each network.