My Environment:
1 - QLogic Card (2 ports for iSCSI)
1 - Dual NIC (2 ports)
1 - Quad NIC (4 ports)
ESX 3.5 with Virtual Center 2.5 is going to be installed. What would I do for a proper port group and virtual switch setup.
Ports are allocated as follows on the ESX host:
Dual NIC
Port 0: vmnic0
Port 1: vmnic1
Quad NIC
Port 0: vmnic2
Port 1: vmnic3
Port 2: vmnic4
Port 3: vmnic5
Here is what I'm thinking for vswitch configurations:
vswitch0 (management)
Port Groups
Service Console
Physical NICs
vmnic0
vmnic2
vswitch1 (iSCSI Auth/VMotion)
Port Groups
Service Console
VMkernel
Physical NICs
vmnic2
vmnic0
vswitch2 (vm traffic)
Port Groups
Virtual Machine Network
Physical NICs
vmnic1
vmnic3
vmnic4
vmnic5
Then obviously the direct iSCSI volumes are mounted in the "Storage Adapters" configuration and have 2 physical ports to do access the disk array with. My primary question is whether or not I need a Virtual Machine Port Group in vswitch0 even though no virtual machines will ever directly bind to that. Instead they will always bind to the Virtual Machine Port Group in vswitch2?
Thank you!
My primary question is whether or not I need a Virtual Machine Port Group in vswitch0 even though no virtual machines will ever directly bind to that. Instead they will always bind to the Virtual Machine Port Group in vswitch2?
Alright
To answer your primary question no you will not need a VM port group in that case. Personally we have virtuals that do management functions in that network (VCenter, VCB , Monitoring) In that case we bind a port group to those adapters to provide connectivity.
You can easily add that later if you decide to do similar.
I would note if this were my configuration I would remove two of thoes adapters from your front end vswitch (so only 2 in there) and create a second SAN vswitch.
This would allow you to guarantee 2Gbps of ISCSI network to the virtuals (so you would create SAN port groups) and drop one adapter in each. For High IOP virtuals this can be considerably better performance in the 3.5 world than RDM or VMDK
May not be necessary but it allows some options.
Jered Rassier
*EqualLogic Technical certified professional
*Dell Enterprise Foundations v.2 Certified professional
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