Best practise for Mangement Console and vMotion

[cngoh]

Dear all,

I am using ESXi 4.1.

One thing to clafify as below.

vSwitch0 - 2 NICs for Mangement console & vMotion with virtual port ID configured.

Management console active adapter is vmnic0 and standby is vmnic4

vMotion active adapter is vmnic4 and standby is vmnic0

vSwitch1 - 2 NICs for NFS vmkernel with IP hash configured.

vSwitch2 - 4 NICs for VM with IP hasd configured.

All the vSwitch above is at same network. (10.3.100.x)

Questions:

1] What is the best practise for management console & vMotion configuration if I have 2 NICs only?

2] If assign 2 NICs for Mangement console & vMotion in a vSwitch like what I configured now, should I configure it as IP hash? As what I tested (unplug UTP cables port by port in sequence and ping management console IP continously), IP hash configuration will produce less loss of packet compared to active - standby configuration.

Regards.

[a_p_]

Questions:

1] What is the best practise for management console & vMotion configuration if I have 2 NICs only?

IMO the way you configured it is perfect for two NICs.

2] If assign 2 NICs for Mangement console & vMotion in a vSwitch like what I configured now, should I configure it as IP hash? As what I tested (unplug UTP cables port by port in sequence and ping management console IP continously), IP hash configuration will produce less loss of packet compared to active - standby configuration.

I would stay with the active/standby configuration. This way you make sure that - in case both NICs are up - you separate the traffic. With IP hash you may have all traffic on one NIC with the other one being idle. IP hash only uses one NIC to each target IP address, there's no link aggregation or load balancing with standard vSwitches. Depending on the time it takes for the NIC to fail over, you may want to configure "das.failuredetectiontime" in a HA environment.

see http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf

André

[khughes]

I agree the way you have it configured for mgmt and vmotion is the best for two nic's. It keeps traffic up and running on its own nic until there is a failure then it'll switch over.

-- Kyle

"RParker wrote: I guess I was wrong, everything CAN be virtualized "

[cngoh]

Thanks for all your reply.

How about my current configuration for NFS vmkernel & VMs? Should I stick with IP hash configuration? Or any better recommendation?

For NFS vmkernel, should I create multiple vmkernel in the vSwitch?

Regards.