Nic's assignment to Virtual Swith

[DSRSAS]

I have ended in situation where there are only 2 nic in M610 dell blades and a requirment to install ESX vsphere 4.0. As i know i need to assign a seprate card to Sevice console, VMport group and Vmkernal.

How I do resolve this issue in with two NICs. There are exchange VMs and Sql VM and File server VMs to be configured in ESX.

What can be done to preserve the performance with limitation of 2 nics

Regards

DSRSAS

[lamw · Accepted solution]

Depends if you're care about performance or redundancy, if you assign pNic0 to SC and pNic1 to VM portgroup/VMkernel (probably bad idea, tie VMkernel with SC) then you don't have redundancy if you lose a pNIC, so it doesn't even matter about performance in my mind at this point.

Best bet due to these restrictions is to nic team and use 802.1q (vlan trunking), you ensure that you have redundant connection you can isolate the traffic using VLANs. If you can get 10gbe that would be cool but all depends on how much traffic you think you'll be driving, probably 2x1gbe pNics would be fine if you can't support 10gbe infrastructure as most places can't at the moment.

If there's some budget....you may want to take a look at Xsigo for a solution using infiniband, works great with a restriction such as this and provides plenty more bandwidth if needed, not only for ethernet but even for FC.

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009

VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:

Twitter: @lamw

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

VMware Developer Comuunity

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".