TheKenApp
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vMotion traffic isolation with VDswitch best practive question (ESXi 5.1)..

I have a question regarding what is the best practice for vMotion traffic utilizing a VDswitch in vSphere 5.1.

Our VDS is shared between two (soon to be 3) ESXi 5.1 hosts. They all have twelve 1GB physical NIC ports. I have created 11 port groups as follows:

  • VLAN trunking is utilized.
  • Four iSCSI port groups. They all physically lead to a switch that is isolated from other switches in our infrastructure so we isolate all iSCSI traffic. This is our VLAN 1060. These port groups each have a dedicated physical NIC assigned to them.
  • All other port groups are physically connected to the same switch.
  • One port group is for Fault Tolerance, VLAN 1066.
  • One port group is for vMotion, VLAN 1065.
  • One port group is for Management, VLAN 1100.
  • We have four other port groups, each with their own VLAN ID. These are for VMs that will reside on various VLANs within our infrastructure (VLAN IDs 20, 30, 1100, 2003).
  • All non-iSCSI port groups share the same active uplinks within the Teaming and Failover settings of the port group. Route is based on physical NIC load.
  • We are using shares defined in the Network Resource Pool to prioritize traffic:
    NFS=50, Management=5, vMotion =10, vSphere SAN=50, vSphere replication=50, iSCSI=50, VM=20, FT=10. I believe these are default values of the network resource pool.

Here is my question: Should we be isolating vMotion traffic by dedicating physical NICs that are exclusively dedicated for vMotion, rather than isolating via VLAN as I have described above? Will vMotion traffic degrade performance in the way I have it configured above?

From the various best practice white papers put out by VMware, I understand that vMotion traffic should be isolated from other traffic. I have done this by utilizing different VLANs for different traffic types. However, I am wondering if vMotion traffic should be isolated by using NIC ports dedicated exclusively for vMotion.

Any help with determining which design is best to use would be greatly appreciated.

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