Need recommendations for physical switch setup

[foxy1977]

Hi All,

I am after design recommendations for the setup of our physcial switches in our 4 host solution.

We currently have all four hosts going into one switch and then onto two redundant firewalls.  I am looking for a design for high availability solution that has two physical switches with each host going into both switches and then onto each firewall.

I've had a little look on the net and had a trawl through my vmware books but cannot see anything.  All the talk of switches seems to relate to virtual switches.  Surely this requirement must be fairly common.

Anyone ideas?  Thanks in advance

[jguzmanr]

that depends really on your vm's.   Are you going to host vm's on different vlans or the same vlans?  if same, then the ports can be configured as regular access ports and you will have no isssues.  If the vm's will be on different vlans, then configure each port as a trunk enable the vlans, and you should be ok.   The third option get's a little trickier, if your switches support virutalization, in other works if the two switches can be managed as one, then you can configure a port channel that consists of all four ports and on the vswitch select route based on ip hash or mac hash. 

[logiboy123]

Please check out my blog posts as a starting point for your network setup.

http://vrif.blogspot.com/2011/10/vmware-vsphere-5-host-network-designs.html

Regards,

Paul