NIC Management???

[Xcore2Soul]

Hello there!!! I am new to vSphere, I have two hosts ESXi 5.5 with 2x1Gbps NICs in both the host. I have as well a NAS which acts as an iSCSI storage for my VMs.

How can  I manage both of my NICs to have good network layout. I used vMotion ofter too.

I have been using both of my NICs for management network and VMs.

Please help me out.

Thank You

[vfk]

Is this a dev/test lab?  Do you have plans/budget to add more nics?  Two nics isnt going to be enough if you plan to production workload on these hosts?  Ideally you want another two nics...but here is what you could do, single vswitch, and have both nics as active with default vswitch settings for VM-Network data, vmotion and so on...

For iscsi, you will need to configur iscsi mpio, here is a iscsi design guide, it is a nice whitepaper that details iscsi design and implementation http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/iSCSI_design_deploy.pdf

Let me know if you require further explanation.

[Xcore2Soul]

Actually I am planning to implement this in a small organization where I will be having 5 VMs. This is the server I am currently having: 3xHP ProLiant ML310e Gen8 v2 Server with 16GB RAM each and 2x2TB HDD each. This is the NAS: TS-469U-RP - Qnap with 4x2TB HDD (RAID10 implemented with total space of 3.5TB) I have installed ESXi 5.5 host in both of the servers and vCenter Server as a VM in one of host and managing them.

My needs are:

1 VM as a FT so I am planning to store that VM in NAS through iSCSI target.

Backup of VMs to one of the iSCSI target in NAS in case of disaster.

So, with only the 2x1Gbps NIC on each host how can I properly do the settings of network so that while backing up VMs there is no network traffic as well redundancy to management and VM network, I have heard of VLAN or VM kernel port but don't know about the implementation and in which scenario to implement.

So please help me out.

Thank You