Vmotion/Management traffic - Standard Switch or DvSwitch

[anandgopinath]

Dear Community 

Is it still the best practise to use vmotion / management traffic ( vmkernal adapters  ) on standard vswitch with NIC teaming and standard LB policy  ?

We are using Vsphere 6.5 U3 . 

Our current setup is each host has 4 vnics  .

            2 of them  connect to standard vswitch with nic teaming and standard LB policy for vmotion/management

            2 of them connect to LAG on dvswitch  for vm traffic  ( lacp on physical network side   ) 

We now have some new servers to setup ( based on HPE synergy  ) and wanted to revisit this topic  .

Appreciate your quick response in this regard 

Any advantage of using  dvswitch 

[depping]

No, most people these days will go all-in on the distributed switch. I would just make sure that the Management Portgroup is set to Ephemeral, as that allows it to work fine without vCenter Server.

[depping]

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Validated-Design/6.0/sddc-architecture-and-design-for-the-manageme...

[anandgopinath]

Dear Duncan 

Thanks alot for taking time to look at my query and for the quick help with an interesting document  🙂

I am blessed  🙂

Just a few follow up questions after going through the validated design  .  

Thank you in advance for some pointers  / guidance  .

1. Should we plan a different distributed switch for the Management /vmotion traffic or is it ok if  we use the same distributed switch with a different LAG for the Vmotion / Management vnics in LACP  ?  Which approach is good  ? 

2. Is it ok to have a single LACP  Uplink   ( lag  ) for both Management / vmotion traffic  with different port groups for each   ?   Should we expect issues while using  vmotion / management traffic with LACP  ? 

3. As we have a mix of old and new hardware in the same ESX cluster, is it ok for us to start with new hosts in the cluster having  management / vmotion in a distributed switch and the old hosts still using them via standard switch  ?   as like for vm traffic , can we migrate the old hosts to the distributed switch config for management / vmotion traffic in a non disruptive way  ?