migrating from standard to distributed switch, how many should be created?

[digerati646]

I am migrating my VMs from standard to distributed switches.  Is there best practices for how many distributed switches you create?  Should the vmotion traffic be on a seperate dvswitch?  My plan was to to one dvswitch for vMotion, and the other for my VMs and mgmt of ESXi servers.  OR should they all just be in the same switch?

Thanks in advance.

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

Remember that each vDS need your own Uplinks (physical network interfaces)... if you have sufficient Uplinks you can create multiple vDS, but with a small number of uplinks, a better approach is create just a single vDS, and an Port Group of each type of traffic (vMotion, mgmt, VM)... and you can specify the uplinks that each Port Group will use using the teaming and failover configuration.

[digerati646]

Thanks that seems to answer that.  I have a Cisco UCS so i can created many nics so I am thinking I still might seperate the vmotion and the rest of it on a different switch so I can dedicate specific NICs just for vmotion without using the teaming and failover area.

One extra question to this, for my vmotion uplinks, should those be active/active or active/standby?  I thought I heard somewhere that the perfomance could be better if you do active/passive so all the traffic goes through the same fabric interconnect on the UCS.

Thanks again.

[rcporto]

You can try using the Multiple-NIC vMotion to take advantage of multiple physical NICs:

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/09/17/multiple-nic-vmotion-in-vsphere-5/

VMware KB: Multiple-NIC vMotion in vSphere 5

[digerati646]

Looks like you can do it but its not vmware best practices and it might not be as efficient with a UCS setup in particular.  Probably just stick to 1 vnic with 1 standby.

http://anexinetisg.blogspot.com/2014/01/configuring-ucs-chassis-with-vmware.html

Thanks!