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Gaprofitt11
Contributor
Contributor

Virtual Switch Design Help.

I need some assistance with our Vsphere 4 environment. I have four nics per blade available. We will be using Vmotion, HA and DRS (manual). We have a four server cluster. I need to properly setup the virtual networking. We have ISCSI for backups on a seperate VLAN as well as our DMZ. All of our storage is SAN based. How would I properly configure the vswitches, vmkernel etc for a best case scenario with 4 nics with redundancy.

Thanks,

Greg

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4 Replies
mackfs
Contributor
Contributor

Are you using ESX or ESXi?

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Gaprofitt11
Contributor
Contributor

ESX

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mbrkic
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Ideally, if you are using network attached storage you would want at least 6 nics (at 1Gb - if you are using 10G things may be a bit different...) - 2 for management, 2 for storage traffic and 2 for workload traffic. Now with 4 it will depend on your usage patterns. If one NIC is sufficient bandwidth for your storage and your workloads I would suggest something like this:

i) two nics for management - one primary for service console access, and the other primary for vMotion. With the other one configured as stand-by in each case.

ii) two nics for storage and workloadds - again one primary for storage, and the other primary for workloads traffic. With the other one configured as stand-by in each case.

This way your storage and workloads traffic will not compete for bandwidth under normal conditions, only in case of failure will you have two types of traffic traversing the same link...

You may need to change the combination if your usage requires it, but just remember that with HA it is very important to have your service console connected redundantly, so you don't trigger HA failover of all the VMs in case the SC looses connectivity.

Cheers,

Milos

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BenConrad
Expert
Expert

KISS

Nics #1 and #2 in vSwitch0, put the vMotion vmkernal, console OS and all LAN portgroups on this switch. Manually balance vMotion and COS/LAN if needed.

Nics #3 and #4 in vSwitch1(or vSwitch1 and vSwitch2), dedicate these NICs to your VMK iSCSI traffic, setup storage for round robin MPIO.

I would much rather have COS/vMotion/LAN competing for 2Gb/s of traffic than my iSCSI. 2Gb/s for LAN traffic is a lot of bandwidth.

Ben

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