VMware Infrastructure Design - Network

[dhuongBB]

Hi Everyone,

I have a  2 X 4 Node Cluster with each node having 6 NIC (4 X 1 GB; 2 X 10 GB NIC). I am currently setting up distributed switch and going back and forth on the setup. Let me know if this is how everyone else should set it up? Appreciate any feedback

vDS_MGMTandvMotion - Port Group for MGMT                            - ACTIVE/ACTIVE - 2 X 1 GB NIC

                                      Port Group for vMotion (vlan XXX)

vDS_VMTraffic - Port Group for all VM -   ACTIVE/ACTIVE - 2 X 1 GB NIC

vDS_iSCSI - iSCSI01 - Port Binding enabled ACTIVE/STANDBY 2 X 10 GB NIC

                    iSCSI02

                    NFS

Should I put the vMotion Network with the storage switch?

Should i put a Active/Standby for the MGMT and vMotion and have MGMT use one primary and one standby and vMotion use one primary and on standby?

Any suggestion would be good

[bayupw]

A few points in my opinion

1. iSCSI

If you are using a single vSwitch/VDS for iSCSI with multiple vmkernels & Port Binding, use Active/Unused for iSCSI1 and Unused/Active for iSCSI2

See this KB and doc for reference

Configuring iSCSI port binding with multiple NICs in one vSwitch for VMware ESXi 5.x and 6.0.x (2045...

http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/whitepaper/iscsi_design_deploy-whit...

vSphere 5.0 Storage Features Part 12 - iSCSI Multipathing Enhancements - VMware vSphere Blog

2. vMotion

Depends on your vMotion requirements.

If you have VMs with huge memory size and 1Gb is not sufficient then you can put it on the storage switch and probably use vSphere Network I/O Control - VMware vSphere 6.5 Documentation Library

But NIOC is another configuration/complexity to manage

I don't know if your storage switch is isolated or not, but let say you have multiple clusters with different vMotion subnet/network and need to vMotion VMs across then you need the vMotion network to be routable and might not be able to put it in the storage switch.

If you have decided to put vMotion as is with Management, you can do Mgmt Active/Standby and vMotion Standby/Active so you alternate the active vmnic.

Overall, this blog post provides a good example: http://www.kendrickcoleman.com/index.php/Tech-Blog/vmware-vsphere-5-host-nic-network-design-layout-a...

Check out the 6 NICs design, below is the diagram from the blog