Best Design for 6 x 1Gb NICs and 4 Port Groups

[TheVMinator]

I have 6 x 1Gb NICs to work with.  These are on half-height blades.  2 of the NICs are onboard.  4 of the NICs are provided through a Single Mezzanine card.

Here are the traffic types I need to split up among the NICs:

-Backup traffic

-Vmotion Traffic

-Management Traffic

-Production virtual machine traffic

What is the best design for this scenario, given that if the mezzanine card fails, I lose 4 out of the 6 NICs?

How many port groups should I use?

Which port groups should go on which NICs?

How many NICs should go to a given port group?

Your suggestions appreciated!

Thanks

[HeathReynolds]

Storage is FC on the other MEZ?

Onboard 1 - Active MGMT, Standby vMotion

Onboard 2 - Active Production Traffic

Mez 1 - Backup Traffic

Mez 2 - Backup Traffic

Mez 3 - Active Production Traffic

Mez 4 - Active vMotion, Standby Management

If you backup traffic is initiated by more than one IP / virtual port ID you could use two interfaces as active for backup, otherwise you could just use one for backup and use the other for multi-nic vMotion or an additional production traffic interface depending on the workload patterns. I think the big think is you want give MGMT and Production traffic the ability to take either the onboard or the mez card.

[TheVMinator]

Good thoughts.  Thanks for the input.  Yes that is right - storage is on the other mezzanine card.  I think I came up with one slight improvement.  What I did is move backup traffic from mez 2 to mez 3.  That way both backup traffic ports are not on the same mezzanine card.  Here is what I came up with:

Onboard 1 - Active MGMT, Standby vMotion

Onboard 2 - Active Production Traffic

Mez 1 - Backup Traffic

Mez 2 - Active Production Traffic

Mez 3 - Backup Traffic.

Mez 4 - Active vMotion, Standby Management