Number of virtual NICs to use with Heartbeat

[Albatross1]

I'm deploying Heartbeat on 2 virtual machines.  How many virtual NICs should I put on each VM?

The deployment guide discusses consolidating IP addresses onto one NIC or breaking them out on different NICs.

It also says if you use multiple vnics you should put them on different virtual switches. 

Since you have to have a mangement, public and channel IP available to be used on each VM, is it easier to just create 3 virtual virtual nics on each VM or should you consolidate multiple IPs onto a single vNIC?

[AltonYu]

You should probably have 2 vnics on each of the VMs - one for management/public ip and the other nic for the VMware channel. The management ip and public IPs need to be on the same vnic.

If you're not going to put them on different vswitches (and physical switches), you would be better off consolidating on the single vnic since you would be in a single point of failure configuration anyways.

The recommendation is to put them on separate vNICs, connected to separate vSwitches and uplinked to different physical NICs and physical switches.

Hope this helps.