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PHLiGHT
Asked: 2011-01-01 10:18:27 +0800 CST

VMware vsphere essentials plus network cabling

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I'm not sure how many NICs I need to use to have vmotion support with my SAN. See the link for a picture, it's laughably crude. Sketch

storage-area-network vmware-esxi vmware-vsphere vmotion

2 Answers

  1. Assuming that you are using iSCSI to connect to your SAN, you'll want at least 8 GigE ports on your VMware Hosts. You'll want 2 for the management port, 2 for vMotion, 2 for iSCSI and 2 for Guest machines (or more than 2 depending on how many vLANs you want, and if they need to have separate physical NICs or not).

    Now each pair of NICs should also be on a seperate vLAN to isolate the network traffic as well. If you have less than 8 physical NICs then you run the risk of an outage if a network card, cable or network switch were to fail.

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  2. Best Answer

    See this list of cabling strategies for various numbers of physical NIC interfaces.

    http://www.networkworld.com/community/taxonomy/term/17790

    For your case, you have FOUR physical NICs (pNIC). Here's the explanation of best practices for that setup:

    pNIC0 -> vSwitch0 -> Portgroup0 (service console)
................. -> Portgroup1 (VMotion)
pNIC1 -> vSwitch0 -> Portgroup2 (Storage Network)
pNIC2 -> vSwitch1 -> Portgroup3 (VM Network)
pNIC3 -> vSwitch1 -> Portgroup3 (VM Network)
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