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timway
Contributor
Contributor

Configuring vSwitches in ESX 3.5

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!

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jayctd
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

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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