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TryllZ
Expert
Expert

ESXi with more than 10 NICs for Backup Networks ?!

Hi all,

As we segregate traffic on different physical NICs, and we also have backup networks, and an ESXi only allows 10 NIC so in this case if I have 6 primary networks and 6 backup networks as listed below.

1 - Management
2 - Management Backup
3 - iSCSI
4 - iSCSI Backup
5 - NFS
6 - NFS Backup
7 - vSAN
8 - vSAN Backup
9 - vMotion
10 - vMotion Backup
11 - Fault Tolerance
12 - Fault Tolerance Backup

How can I have this working with an ESXi, if anyone can provide some details on how to create backup networks in this case.

Thank You

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nachogonzalez
Commander
Commander

Hey @TryIIZ how are you?

By Backup networks you mean an alternative network in case the primary fails (HA) or you mean a dedicated network to take backups?

Please consider, you can designate vmkernel adapters for different kinds of traffic (Management, vMotion, vSAN, Fault tolerance, etc) on the same vSwitch and assign uplinks (Phyiscial NICs) on the host.
So you would have 2 or 4 NICs (depending on how you wish to configure it) Bound to the services mentioned above.

In my experience, I have seen deployments that used 2 vMotion networks, 2 Management networks (Second was for provisioning) but having all the other with a backup is excessive.
What you might be interested in doing is playing with the uplink  teaming and failover policies
Configure NIC Teaming, Failover, and Load Balancing on a Distributed Port Group or Distributed Port ...


Also, Are you going to use vSAN, NFS and iSCSI? or you just want to configure them in case they are needed?


let me know if that helps



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depping
Leadership
Leadership

This is why they invented VLANs 🙂

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