Redundancy/Best pracites when setting up VM hosts

[rabican]

When we configure new VM hosts we run nic1 and 3 to switch 1 and then NIC 2 and 4 to switch 2. NIC /3 map to a private Vlan for VM guests and nic2/4 go to a Vlan for public IPs.

I’ve never taken a VM training so I’m unsure if this is best practices. Im not sure if it’s possible but I was thinking what if we just made every port a trunk-port then plugged it into VMware and then had VMware assign the Vlans somehow for each Virtual machine port group.

Also we plan on switching to a vSphereDS soon. Unsure if this changes things, any info would be apprecitated! Thanks.

[rcporto]

With your design, you already achieve redundancy at vmnic level and traffic isolation... and depending on how your VMs demands network traffic your design should works without problem. But if for example, VMs from vSwitch0 demand more traffic than two vmnic can guarantee, you may have a network bottleneck and maybe the better option is put all vmnic on a single vSwitch and do traffic isolation using VLAN.