Vmotion Nic question regarding implementing vsphere 5.1 solution with SAN

[robinski]

Hey,

We are in the design faze of a vsphere 5.1 implementation. The specific question that I have is should I put the Host vmotion traffic on my core flat network or on the Iscsi network?

Thanks,

Rob

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - Ideally vmotion traffic should be on its own isolated network - who many physical NICs do you have in you ESXi host?

[JagadeeshDev]

Its always a best practice to have vMotion in a separate network to avoid the bottle necks. As said above , if you have physical NIC's available you can have that dedicate for vMotion

[mrlesmithjr]

Definitely depends on if you are using 1GB or 10GB and how many physical nics in the host. Also what version of vSpere you using (Ent, Ent+, etc.) And if you are planning on using vDS (vSphere Distributed Switches) or vSS (vSphere Standard Switches). However as said above best practice is to keep vMotion traffic isolated on its own subnet.

You can look at a few ideas using vDS (vSphere Distributed Switches) here.

Here is also an example diagram of another option with 4 physical nics using vSS.

[robinski]

Each host has 8 nics, the SAN has 10 nics.

The current plan is as follows:

ISCSI Network

SAN / 8 nics. 4->iswitch1 & 4->iswitch2

HOSTS: 2nics, 1->iswitch1, 1->iswitch2

Core Network ( Our LAN)

Vmotion 2nics / host

Mgmt 2 nics/ host, 2nics for SAN, & 2nics from Iscsi switches

VM traffic 2nics/host

We have a flat network. We will be creating a VLAN for vMotion. No trunking will be performed on the management or VM network ports.

Rob Keller

Manager, Information Systems | Global Software, Inc.

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[JagadeeshDev]

The above configuration looks good to me.