VMotion switches

[Dave_van_Wijck]

Goodday!

I want to have new VMotion switches of Cisco to serve about 20 hosts. Is there any model that is best for this environment.

I know about the best practice docs, but maybe there is a very good experience with certain Cisco switches for this.

Thanks in advance for any reply 🙂

[scott28tt]

I've reported your thread and recommended to moderators that it is moved to a better location - the {code} area is for SDK matters.

[depping]

You want to buy network switches specifically to be used for vMotion? I would say that "faster" is better here, so high bandwidth for the switches and NICs would lower vMotion times. We (VMware) has never provided a list of switches we would recommend over others. We have some basic recommendations, like enabling Jumbo Frames for instance. Those can be found here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vcenterhost.doc/GUID-7DAD15D4-7F41-....

[Dave_van_Wijck]

When is 2*1Gb not enough for 1 host?

When is 10Gb needed for 1 host?

[a_p_]

Well, it depends on your environment, i.e. the VM's (basically the memory) that needs to be transferred, and the maximum time that you can afford to e.g. evacuate a host, or site.
As an example, one of my customers had the requirement to evacuate a complete site due to planned power outage on short notice (almost every other month). With the existing 1Gb vMotion configuration (even with multi-nic vMotion) it took almost 20-30 min. per host, which was too long, that's why we went to 10Gb vMotion.

André

[Dave_van_Wijck]

Thank you for your answer.

What do you mean by multi-nic vMotion?

[pkvmw]

One vmkernel adapter with vMotion tagged should only use one corresponding network uplink. If you want multiple network uplinks to be utilized (e.g. for redundancy, better performance) you'll need to do special configuration to be supported: see KB https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2007467. (If not doing it this way, it could cause some strange issues with vMotion connectivity)

Also, the more vmkernel adapter you have with vMotion, you get more vMotion processes in parallel (each 1 GBe gives you 4 concurrenet vMotions, 10 GBe 8 vMotions). Could speed up things.

Regards,
Patrik