How to carve up 10 GbE?

[chip9]

I see a lot of marketing jibber jabber about doing more with less network cabling on 10 GbE but I've been unsuccessful finding an entry "how to" take my 10 GbE port and isolate (for example) 2 GbE for guests, 2 GbE for vmotion 2 GbE for a backup network and 4 GbE for iSCSI.

How do you do this or what documentation can I RTFM?

[spravtek]

Are you talking about the Virtual Connect Flex-10 NIC solution from HP or just general 10GbE?

What network setup do you have?

[chip9]

I'm talking about just general 10 GbE ports on a typical server that has 10 GbE NIC ports. The marketing hype I've seen doesn't say it only works in proprietary configurations.... Is carving up 10 GbE NIC ports a proprietary feature?

[spravtek]

I'm not sure about carving up general 10GbE nics ... Besides using VLANs ... I don't think there's anything available... Maybe someone knows a technology that does this (non-proprietary)

The other methods/technologies are all proprietary as far as I know ...

[jdptechnc]

From the vSphere perspective, your isloation will be accomplished using Port Groups.  You would create one or more port groups for your VM's, one for vMotion, two for iSCSI (for multipathing), one for management traffic, and so on.  In your vSwitch or dvSwitch settings (depending on whether you're using standard or distrbuted switches), you can do crude traffic shaping on a portgroup level and set peak/burst settings, though this probably isn't recommended.

If you are licensed for Enterprise Plus on version 5.x and are using distributed switches, you can use Network I/O control and use network resource pools to manage allocating available bandwidth per application - this would be the VMware recommended method.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.networking.doc_50%2FGUID-ADE...

Much like with CPU and Memory, it is not recommended to set hard reservations or limits on network resources unless you have a good reason...

[BFNLocal]

I can only speak with authority for the new range of Dell 12G servers;

These servers are supplied with a Network Daughter Card (NDC) option instead of the onboard solutions.

The range (and there are QLogic, Intel and Broadcom solutions) of NDC cards are hardware configurable into 4 virtual ports per physical 10GbE port in increments of 100Mb, and are switch agnostic.  The technique is known as NPAR (Network Partitioning).

More information can be found here:

http://search.euro.dell.com/results.aspx?s=gen&c=uk&l=en&cs=&k=NPAR&cat=all&x=0&y=0

This is a Broadcom 57810s PCI adapter:

http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/broadcom-57810s-dual-port-10gbe-sfp/pd?refid=bdcom-57810s-dualport...

Regards

[JeffStratumLS]

I believe the hype you've read about regarding "doing more with less" using 10GB adapters is via the use of Converged Network Adapters (CNA) that have the capability to create virtual NICs (vNICs) and virtual HBAs (vHBAs) to have several adapters using a single network connection.  Doing this, you can assign individual vNICs to different vSwitches and VMs for different purposes.  You can also take advantage of Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for multiple storage virtual connections via the same card and network connection.

HTH,

Jeff