vSphere Networking Setup and Next Steps

[shimmyt]

Hi all, we're kind of at a crossroads in our vSphere setup. We're running ESXi 4.1 with an enterprise license so no vds Anyway heres what our current setup looks like:

pnic0  -  vswitch0  -  VMKernel (vMotion)

pinic4                      VMKernel (Service Console)

                               VMNetwork1

                               VMNetwork2

                               .

                               .

                               VMnetwork8

pnic1  -  vswitch1 -   VMKernel (vMotion)

pinic5                      VMKernel (Service Console)

                               VMNetwork9

                               VMNetwork10

                               .

                               .

                               VMnetwork13

pnic8  -  vswitch2  -  VMNetwork14 (Multicast Traffic)

Each VMNetwork is a seperate vlan as well (no cisco gear network wise here). Now this setup it's working ok for now. We would like to add more of our multicast traffic networks and we want to try to keep this as simple as possible for wiring wise. I have 12 pnics available for each host and I'm wondering how to spread this traffic out. Currently we don't get much of a load on either of the current vswitches (the host had a peak usage of 29,658 KBps for the month). Any advice or pointing in a direction of documentation would be useful.

[logiboy123]

Hope this helps:

http://www.kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vsphere-host-nic-configuration-10-nics.html

[idle-jam]

do you want to look into vlan tag and trunk, i'm not sure if 9 physical cables coming out from a host would look nice, just imagine if you have 4 hosts and you will need 36 cables and not to mention 36 network switch ports ..

[dquintana]

Hello shimmyt

Think in use cards for redundancy and segregate the VMs traffic to the VMkernel/management traffic.

Like the other user suggest, you can use port trunks to provide multiple vlans and then differentiate the traffic withe each portgroup.

regards

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Diego Quintana