HA DRS Network Best Practices

[rvirene]

I was told by a VMWare consultant that HA and DRS should really use only gigabit connections for all aspects of networking - VM Network, Service Console, VMKernal. I have 100mb everywhere except a direct connection between my two hosts, which is gigabit. I have read the documentation, but did not find this information. I know that VMotion requires 1000mb on the VMKernal. What is the best practice please? Has anyone relied on 100mb and had decent success?

Thanks,

Rick

[zbenga]

so i gather you only have 2 hosts and used a cable between them for vmotion?

I don't understand a few things, if you did that for vmotion how do you connect to your storage? if you use local storage then vmotion is out of the question until dmotion makes a "re-appearance".

Usually for vmotionHADRS to work you would need shared storage, your hosts connect to the storage via a HBA (FC/iSCSI) this would be at 1/2/4 GbE. Your vmotion port would be 1GbE then the rest is really up to you, service console is ok with 100Mbit.

[rvirene]

I've got a fiber SAN shared by the hosts. I did a bit more reading and I believe that a good move would be to upgrade the Service Console connections to gigabit. Thanks for the reply.

[danam]

I had a DRS issue the other day, and the VMware technician told me that VMkernel interface needs to able to reach the default gateway. This can be diagnosed with "vmkping -D -v"

Therefore a direct HA/DRS link was outruled. (unless \_maybe_ you do something funky like proxy-arp with default route)

HTH

Dan

[hicksj]

FYI, we recently had a 1Gbps host NIC (supposedly) fail on vSwitch0. The secondary NIC (only used in failover situations) is attached to a 100Mbps port. We've never had issues in the past with VMotion etc being 100Mbps. However, HA is reporting a connectivity problem on that host. Our techs called support and they were told HA requires GigE. This is news to me.

But now that I look at the system myself, it turns out that the NIC is responding, and off the GigE side. Yet HA is down (and the guests were evacuated). Looks like I have some followup to perform....

Regards,

J