how many vnics for 1000v

[tdubb123]

how many vnics should I be assigning for the 1000v?

should i use 2 vnics (10GB) each on the UCS as what best practice is recomending? What about iscsi? does those need o be on separate vnics?

[michaelstump]

If you've got 10Gbit between your hosts and your network (via the fabric interconnects), you can safely run on two vNICs per ESXi host. What are you doing via iSCSI? Booting, or storage? QoS will be important with two uplinks; you don't want vMotion traffic to squash your management or data traffic.

[tdubb123]

iscsi is used for datastore only. no boot from iscsi yet. with 10gb, it would not matter if i had 2nics or 8 nics right since they all will flow through the same card?

Is qos done via ucs or nexus 1k?

thanks

[michaelstump]

Depends on your configuration. What kind of IOMs are you using? In theory, you can run two 2208 IOMs per 5108, with each port at 10Gbit/sec, for a total of 160Gbit of bandwidth from your blades to your fabric interconnects. Then it'll depend on your network uplinks.

As long as you have your two vNICs pinned to separate fabrics (vNIC0 to A, vNIC1 to B), you've got full redundancy from a hardware perspective (at least from the server's interfaces out). And the 10Gbit bandwidth should handle most ESXi host workloads without trouble. Just monitor their usage. If you're pushing above 50% on either link on a regular basis, it's time to add more vNICs.

QoS is usually done in the 1000v, in my experience. Most network engineers who are familiar with NX-OS can more quickly learn the 1000v's QoS commands than learn UCSM. Just my opinion.

[tdubb123]

on some blades we have the m81KR. and some have the vic 1280.

I think I have 2 10gb connecitons to each 2208. So 40gb per chassis.

[tdubb123]

how do you monitor your bandwidth usage on the ucs?