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ktwebb68
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-05-2007 08:32 AM

VMotion Engineering

Blades with only two physical NIC's. I am curious if there is a way, that is obviously escaping me but may still be obvious to some, of having fault tolerance, and providing the VMotion interface with a private network. Blades are currently setup with all functions, service console-VM Network and Vmotion connections on VSwitch. NIC one is primary and NIC2 is the standby NIC. Currently all three functions have public IP's. (Public to our network of course. It may be right in front of me but I am not seeing a way to make it work. Possibly Active for SC and VM traffic for portgroups and Standby for VMotion, then reverse that the other physical NIC would be a way right? but what happens if one NIC fails? I haven't tried it but could you leave it the way it is but still assign private IP's to the VMotion port group and it still work? I was told by the person that set this up originally when he assigned a private address VMotion did not work.

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4 Replies
admin
Immortal
Immortal
‎03-05-2007 08:38 AM

>> I haven't tried it but could you leave it the way it is but still assign private IP's to the VMotion port group and it still work

Yes, that would work fine, but remember if you are using iSCSI storage the SAN and VMKernel have to be on the same subnet, so you'd need to re-ip your SAN to the private network too. If you're using FC storage then no problem.

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ktwebb68
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-05-2007 08:43 AM

It's all fiber channel. Have you done this personally? Not shedding doubt on your expertise. Only reason I ask is the guy that set this up said he already tried it and VMotion failed. I have some test blades to play with so I will check it out. Thanks for the information. If I test and it works I'll close the thread, award points, etc..

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admin
Immortal
Immortal
‎03-05-2007 08:51 AM

Yes this is how our ESX2.5.x setup was implemented, on IBM HS20 blades with a DS4300 SAN backing them.

On ESX3 we are using routable IPs as we are now using iSCSI SAN storage so I haven't actually tested it, but I can't see why it wouldn't work as long as you can vmkping between the boxes.

ktwebb68
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-05-2007 08:56 AM

10-4. I'll give it a shot tonight and post back with my results. Thanks.

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