dvSwitch - Failover VMNIC and Network Control?

[PeterLind]

Hi there.

We're moving to a new datacenter and have decided to move from the Nexus 1000v to Vmware's vDS. So it's still a bit new for us.

We have 2x 10Gbit NICs. One for VM traffic and the other for vMotion, and they're failover (standby) for eachother.

We're worried that in case of a NIC failover that vMotion traffic will impact the VM traffic too much. What is the best practise to avoid that?

We have considered traffic shaping on the vMotion vDS-portgroup setting it down to max 7Gbit traffic. That means we're wasting 3Gbit when there's no failover... Any advice or better ideas?

Info:

ESXi/vCenter 5.0 Update 3

Best regards
Pete

[MKguy · Accepted solution]

Use NIOC shares instead of hard traffic shaping limits on the port groups for bandwidth management. This way you don't waste unused bandwidth and you can even have both uplinks active for VM and vMotion traffic. NIOC will make sure that traffic is prioritized based on the shares you specify.