Running vMotion on DATA Network

[Phoung]

Currently I have my ESXi hosts installed with 4 10GBit Fiber cards. I use 2 of them for my VM data traffic. And two of them for Vmotion traffic.

I want to run my VMotion network over the 2 VM data traffic cards now, so I can free up fiber ports. I checked my traffic coming from the ESXi hosts and I only do about 1 Gbit maybe 2 Gbit.

Still my co-worker who is senior to me tells me I cannot run VMotion over the 2 Fibers cards I use for my VM traffic(active-standby mode), that it will cause problems and eat up all my bandwidth when I do VMotions. I am not a networking person, it seems unreasonable to assume though that a VMotion could eat up so much bandwidth. He also stated it just would not work, but to me its just adding the appropriate VLAN to my 2 VM data nics, and moving the VMotion kernel port there.

Could someone explain why my idea is bad? I am simply trying to do a cost savings by freeing up valuable 10GBit ports.

[a_p_]

vMotion can (and will) indeed max out the available bandwidth. Anyway, I'm running such a configuration (with vMotion in a separate VLAN though) using distributed switches with Network I/O control (default share values) enabled, which works without issues.

André

[DrKim]

Hi,

Why not to use trafic shaping on the vmotion portgroup? If your VM's max transfer is 2Gbits, then shape vmotion max traffic down to 6Gbits to be very safe.

-0,02$

[Phoung]

‌Thank you everyone. Can vmotion really push upwards of 6gbit?? I think for now I will create my active vmotion port in my standby data port. So I can still free up fiber and not interfere.

I ill will look into enabling network io control I have it disabled I was worried to use it.

I Would like to test it separate on a couple of test hosts. I can have another distribute switch in vcenter I can test it on?