Planning and Design

[vmmax2479]

redundancy, high-availability and load-balancing

Hardware

1. SAN (Fiber or iSCSI)

2. 3 ESX hosts

3. 2 cores managed switches.

How would you build a design that would accomplish all the above?

[kooltechies]

Hi,

Can you give some more pointers in terms of NIC cards per server , storage cards per server , fibre switches etc

Thanks,

Samir

P.S : If you think that the answer is helpful please consider rewarding points.

[vmmax2479]

This is open for suggestion. Let's say company has a budget for it...

[azn2kew · Accepted solution]

Generally, you have networking and storage redundant and for VMware should configure HA, DRS and VMotion cluster so that all VMs can be migrated for maintenance and provide 99.999% uptime if you have enough resources for them. Using N+1 design should allow you to do so, and make sure your HBAs are redundant via storage processors and LUN should be around 400-600GB in size and have multiple NICs connected vswitches & hosts.

For example : 8 NICs in a physical host:

1. NIC1-2 ->Service Console/VMotion

2. NIC3-4->VMotion/SC

3. NIC5-6->Virtual Machine

4. NIC7-8->DMZ/Backup/iSCSI whatever you want, but basically any of these port group should have at least 2 NICs for redundancy. You can use VLAN if you want to manage your VMs networking and traffic as well. Look at www.vmware.com for further details on standard best practices.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant