We have a new environment with 4 HP blade servers, two 10 GB Ethernet switches and an HP 3PAR SAN. Each ESXi host has 8 x 10 GB NICs. We have vSphere 5.5 Enterprise Plus licenses for the ESXi hosts.
The contractor installed and configured standard switches instead of distributed switches. Should we use distributed switches for easy network management, consistency and expansion of VM networks? I think we are limited to 4 standard switches with 8 NICs per host.
Thanks,
H Doan
If you have the licensing, use distributed switches. This will make management easier and provide you with additional capabilities.
Instead of recreating, just migrate everything. Create the VDS, create portgroups, and use the migration wizard.
Hello hdoan,
indeed, dvSwitches are best used from the get-go instead of choosing to migrate to them when the networking environment has been estabilished. Although I am not aware of any vSwitch limit, the maximum limit is 4096 ports the vSwitches can serve in total.
Nevertheless if you feel confident in managing a dvSwitch, go for it! It provides some additional features (ingress traffic shaping, Network I/O Control, and Private VLANs and a few more...) It will ease up your life with network setting in future deployments. Just be sure to back up the config once in a while You also have a lot of options for redundancy and your network can be estabilished beautifully with 8x 10GbE uplinks.
Hi Alistar,
Thanks for your suggestions. I agree with you but the contractor thinks it's not a good idea since DVS depends on vCenter Server; when vCenter Server goes down, we can't manage the networks/switches, see the comment below. I think the benefits of VDS outweigh the risk not be able to make changes to the network when vCenter Server is down. Your thoughts?
"I read the Memo and recommendations for moving Management and vMotion to a Distributed Virtual Switch, but I do not agree with it. If vCenter goes down, data will continue to traverse the switch, but you will be unable to manage those switches directly from the host. If you needed to do any modifications to those networks/switches for troubleshooting you would not be able to. "
I agree with the other posters, go with vDS. Centralized management is much easier than having to maintain standard switches on each host, etc.
Needing to make changes to the network while it is down is rare. That being said it is recommended to have Vcenter on a separate management cluster and possibly on a standard switch in that 2 node cluster. Another option is to just setup DRS rules for vcenter to only be able to run on a couple hosts in cause it goes down you know which one it is on to get it back online.
The consultant suggests that we put management and vMotion on a standard switch all VM networks are on vDS, our vCenter server is a physical server. Is that necessary? What can be bad if the management network is on vDS beside can't configure VM networks/vDS when vCenter is down? I can't think of any case that we want to make changes to VMware when vCenter is down anyway.
Thanks,
hdoan