Tagged Service Console

[HammondC]

I reciently moved my Service console to be a tagged in with the rest of my Virtual Machine networks. The attached picture says it all. Is this an acceptable configuration? It was dissapointed to note that the "currently has no management network redundancy" message did not go away. Previously the Service console was setup similar to the VMkernel with only 1 physical adaptor. I moved it to the current config (attached). Thanks.

[jbogardus]

If you right click your hosts and select "Reconfigure for HA" the warning message should go away now that there is network redundancy for the service console

[HammondC]

Yes, that did clear that message however my main question is, is this an acceptable configuration using tagging and mixing Service console with VM networks? Which may in tern lead to doing the same with the VMkernel. Thanks.

[naveenvm]

Thats not the recommended way. It is advised to keep SC and VM networks on separate vSwitches as per best practices.

Whats more important to you ?

Are you using iScsi storage on this ESX? Or you are having heavy network load for VMs i.e.need to have two nics for VMnetwork?

NUTZ

VCP 3.5

(Preparing for VCP 4)

[shimmyt]

No heavy load on network usage. The network usage is actually fairly low. That's dual nics is more for redundancy. We are running Fibre Channell storage so no iSCSI involved. The question really comes from wanting to save our switch guy from killing us for asking for redundant ports for this network. Oh and I work with the OP

[naveenvm]

Well, in that case, I guess that is the only solution with 3 nics. You can keep SC and VMs on same vSwitch, but do remember, keep the two nics in active/ standby fashion for ur SC and VM.

Nic active for SC should be passive to VMs and vice-versa.

NUTZ

VCP 3.5

(Preparing for VCP 4)

[shimmyt]

The surprising thing is we don’t have issues with the number of ports available on the hosts. Just the number of ports on the switch.

[HammondC]

The vSwitch is set to active/active. Why would we set it to active/passive for the service console only?

[naveenvm]

With only 3 ports available you need to decide either of two - load balancing or failover.

For, SC - failover holds more importance and as u said VMs aren't too much of load on network. So with active / passive setting you can achieve failover for both of these i.e if somehow nic1 fails SC will automatically be shifted to nic2 and if nic2 fails the VMs will automatically be shifted to nic1. That's why......

NUTZ

VCP 3.5

(Preparing for VCP 4)

[HammondC]

We ended up making two vswitches each with two physical adapters. On each vswitch is a service console and Vmkernel.

[ToddStriegel]

What about in cases of FCoE? We have each host with two CNAs. The two are in a vSwitch and have multiple port-groups assigned to that vSwitch (Service Console, VMK, VM Networks). In the case where you now only have two connections, what would be the prefered configuration?