Best practice for hosting multiple vlan in a esxi host

[dhchentw]

Hello,

I plan to host multiple vlan in a esxi host. Should I create a vSwitch for every vlan, each vSwitch only contains a port group for that VLAN, or create a single big vSwitch and connect multiple port group to this vSwitch?

Current i'm using the later one. Is there any pros and cons for both solutions? Which one should be considered as best practice?

[HeathReynolds]

One vswitch, trunk to physical switch, create a port group per VLAN. Use at least two physical NICs.

On vswitch for multiple VLANs is generally considered a best practice, you would quickly run out of physical NICs trying to do a new switch for every VLAN.

Most of the time multiple standard switches do end up used. It is normal to have one vswitch for MGMT/vMotion, one for guests, and one for IP storage (if needed).

[chriswahl]

I would agree with HeathReynolds - the concept you describe is called Virtual Switch Tagging (VST) and is typically the recommended way to present VLANs. It reduces complexity required by limiting the number of vSwitches required while at the same time allowing you to combine multiple physical network adapters into a vSwitch for higher availability and failover / teaming.

If you have a large abundance of physical network adapters, you may want to partition them out into unique vSwitches based on traffic type. Example: one for virtual machines, another for management and vMotion, and a third for IP storage.

I review many different network scenarios for 1 Gb and 10 Gb links in the Networking for VMware Administrators book available on March 24th: http://goo.gl/Jjkimq