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jbethune
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Contributor

vMotion in this setup (3 hosts, SAN)

Finished a Dell implementation yesterday with Esxi 5.1, 3 hosts and PS 4100 SAN. I have created a cluster in my "lab" environment and now looking at setting up vmotion. Here is the basic setup:

Hosts - IP's of 192.168.100.1-.3 (Connected back to core lan ,VMnetwork and management same vcswitch)

Vcenter Appliance - 192.168.100.163

iSCSI Network on 2 dedicated stacked 6224 switches. Port 1 set back to core lan and the rest were set for the iSCSI network using 10.100.1.15-.20 (Dell techncian set all ports to that vlan)

Should I setup vmotion on the Dell 6224 switches? Meaning I will have to go in and change what the Dell tech did or can I use the same iSCSI network for vmotion so I could setup a vmotion vswitch and assign 2 NIC's per host and use 10.100.1.21-26 for the 3 hosts? This environment will run about 20 VM's ranging from a single exchange server, sql and a few webservers that are low useage.

I did test using 10.110.1.22-23 for the first host with multi NIC setup of vmotion. I think I would need to go into the stacked switches console and assign the 3 ports on that switch to a new vlan for vmotion correct?

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a_p_
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Leadership

Best practice is to use a dedicated subnet in it's own non-routed VLAN for vMotion.

André

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jbethune
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So its ok to use the same switch stack for the SAN as long as I go in and create a VLAN on the stack for just vMotion? Does it matter what VLAN number i put in on the vmkernal setup ?

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

I'm not familiar with this switch, but I'm pretty sure it will have no problems to handle the vMotion traffic without affecting the storage traffic. How are the switches connected with each other (1GBit, Trunk, 10GBit)?

André

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jbethune
Contributor
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Thanks Andre

They are connected with 10GBit. I didnt' select a VLAN when I created the vMotion port groups. I should probably isolate them from the iSCSI network as per best practice but I was hoping to avoid having to configure the stacked Powerconnect switches

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