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comunedilonigo
Contributor
Contributor

Assign specific NIC to a specific destination IP

Good morning

I wish to "route" NFS traffic out of a specific NIC for a specific NFS server

As far as I understand ESXi suggestion is "create a different network", assign that network to a specific vmkernel + switch and associated NIC

A side effect of this approach is that I have other hosts that need to access NFS and they too should have IP in that subnet, if possible I would avoid this.

(having NFS traffic passing trough the default route is not acceptable)

So, the question is, can I route a specific destinatio trough a specific NIC ?

Thank you

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6 Replies
NicolasAlauzet

Repliying to your specific question: No, that is not possible to do.

I quite not get what you are saying here "A side effect of this approach is that I have other hosts that need to access NFS and they too should have IP in that subnet, if possible I would avoid this"

That should be the perfect scenario, a dedicated vlan for that type of traffic, and then you configure all your servers that need to access the share to have IP in that segment. (Security you manage that at the Share level, allowing or not the access)

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depping
Leadership
Leadership

for this scenario people typically have a network segment and they create a route for it?

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ZibiM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hello

Could you create one VLAN for attaching ESXi servers to the NFS and 2nd VLAN for attaching VMs with NFS needs to the NFS ?

Usually NFS storage units can support multiple virtual interfaces in separate VLANs

You don't need extra switches or extra NICs for that

I ran similar scenario with the pair of 10gb uplinks covering whole networking needs several years ago without much trouble

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comunedilonigo
Contributor
Contributor

Adding a VLAN config is something that has to be maintained

As I said, if possible, I would avoid it

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comunedilonigo
Contributor
Contributor

Your suggestion is the most portinent one, failing to route traffic trough a specific NIC

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comunedilonigo
Contributor
Contributor

A summary of findings:

- No, it is not possible to route a specific IP destination to a specific NIC

If you have two NFS NAS and you are transfering from one to the other you really need to have a separate vmkernel + vSwitch + nic

I had the vmdisks on one nas and was using gettoVCB to backup on another NAS, performance was lousy 30MBytes/s (nic are 1Gbps)

with a separate path the performance is close to 140MBytes/s

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