Best Practices for vSphere 4.(1) on UCS

[redking77]

Good Morning,

I come from previous VMWare/ESX experience, and that experience has always been with ESX hosts on stand-alone servers.   I am getting ready to do a migration from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4.1 on Cisco UCS hardware.   My current ESX host configuration is made up of multiple 1GB and 10GB ethernet adapters (4x1GB for vMotion, Service Console, Guest Networks), and (2x10GB for Storage - NFS backended).   While this is a good model, I want to know what is the BEST approach when going forward with Cisco UCS. 

I know that our new UCS chassis will come with 10Gb interconnect modules, and also has the ability to carve out virtualized adapters for the ESX hosts.   I want to know, if in UCS world -- it is better to use multiple virtualized 1GB adapters to segment VMWare protocols as I did in ESX 3.5 (with all the active-standby uplinks, etc).  Or is it better to go with just 2x10GB interfaces and not segment the various VMWare type traffic?  Or is there an even better way to take advantage of the new UCS networking?   Another change for us, is that we're dropping NFS and going to HBAs for storage.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

r3dk1ng

[DSTAVERT]

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps9441/ps9670/white_paper_c11-496511.pdf

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1541246

[redking77]

Thanks, but that seems to be about 10GB in general, but not exactly using the 10GB that's in the UCS.   Yes, the 10GB in UCS is similar to CNAs, but with UCS you can carve out all sorts of NIC options, and I wanted to know what is the BEST practice combining UCS and vSphere 4.1 together.   I am sure somebody out there knows...

Thanks for the info, it's good info too..

r3dk1ng

[DSTAVERT]

I think I would start at the Cisco site/forums/whitepapers. That would be a better place to start for hardware configuration advice. Do a quick search here in the forums to see if there is anything appropriate.

[redking77]

Thanks, I will ask the Cisco community as well.  But again, I want to know what vmware people are doing when it comes to using vSphere 4.1 on UCS specifially and how they are taking advantage of UCS in regards to networking.  IE.  Their experiences, and approaches.  

ie, how they are breaking out vmotion, service console, guest networks, etc... are they giving their vm guests 1GB vnics, or 10GB nics, etc.   I am trying to do research which will aide in my build out of vSphere 4.1 on UCS.