Are 2 10Gb Nics enough?

[vSchu]

I am working on a datacenter project that is going from FC to NFS storage (NetApp). The blades the customer is looking at have 2 10Gb ports. I have requested an additional 2 ports via mezzanie card but have been denied because of cost. I have not setup an environment using NFS before so I wanted to put it out to the community....

Will 2 10Gb nics with NIOC enabled be sufficient.

(P.S. I know this comes with the answer "well it depends" but looking more for input from someone who has deployed this before or seen the need for more than 2 10Gb ports.)

Thanks!

[weinstein5]

YOu can consider it this way that NAS/NFS has been deployed for years using 1 GB ports so yes 2 10 GB ports should be enough =

[rickardnobel]

Donald Schubot wrote:

I am working on a datacenter project that is going from FC to NFS storage (NetApp). The blades the customer is looking at have 2 10Gb ports. I have requested an additional 2 ports via mezzanie card but have been denied because of cost.

Will you also drive all other traffic through the same 10 Gigabit interfaces? I.e. vMotion, Management and all VM traffic.

It should work out without problems, but you should check the present Fibre Channel usage. If you have 8 Gbit FC, perhaps with 2 HBA ports on each host, then it is possible, but not very likely, that these FC ports are being used to max at times.

You might also want to check out the present VM traffic usage, which typically is quite low, but as you say - it will depend. If your VMs are really bandwidth hungry and you from times to times uses 8 Gbit on FC then it might be a bit tight. So if possible check the present usage from the vCenter statistics and I belive you will find that all network and storage traffic will fit into 2 x 10 Gbit.