Arthur's questions

I am looking for some recommendations on the network design for my ha-ft and all-flash-vsan-enabled vsphere cluster.

I've planed around vsphere a bit, but newbie to vsan and ha/ft. I've Googled and searched here on StackExchange, but I just can't get my head around where to start for my network design.

To all the vsphere experts out there, if you could offer some guidance/starting point, that would be much appreciated.

My all-flash VSAN will be configured for RAID5.

Hosts: 4x identical ESXI hosts each with:

• 1x Intel E5-2620v4 CPU
• 64GB RAM (2x 32GB DDR4-2133MHz ECC RAM)
• 1x 200GB Intel DC S3700 Enterprise SATA SSD for cache
• 2x 480GB Micron 5100 Pro Enterprise SATA SSDs for capacity
• Onboard NIC with 4x 1GBe ports
• Add-on NIC with 4x 10GBe ports (Intel X710 on PCIe 3.0/x8)

Switches:

• 2x 16ports 10GBe L2 Switches dedicated to vsphere traffic(ubiquiti es-16-xg)
• 1x 24ports 1GBe L3 Switch for general traffic (Aruba 2540 24G PoE+)
• 1x 24ports 1GBe L2 Swtich for general traffic (HPE 1820-24G)

What's troubling me is how to design based on my exact environment, specifically:

• allocation of NICs (virtual and physical) between VSAN, FT-logging, vMotion etc traffic
• dedicated NIC or shared
• multi-NIC vMotion? (i read somewhere this is not required as i have 10GBe NICs)
• should i use teaming (route based teaming)?
• vss / dvs / dvPortGroup allocation

I know there are official VMware guides, and many many blogs which have recommended configurations. However, I'm hoping to leverage everyone's knowledge on how best to configure the network given I have 4x1GBe+4x10GBe per host.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks!

I am seeking recommendations for shared storage options to support ESXi HA cluster (note I'm NOT asking for product/brand/model recommendation - I know this is against the rules here). I am asking for technology recommendation.

The company I work for is a small business. At the moment, we have one HP DL380 G9 with DAS, with ESXi 6.0, running our custom developed application. We are now looking at how to achieve HA/FT using the most economical option. We need HA/FT because I'm the one-man-IT-team and I am often away traveling so manual failover/restore is not an option.

I understand we need minimum of 2 ESXi host (physical server) and shared storage to achieve HA/FT. This is, I think, where it gets interesting: even the cheapest entry level storage array out there is probably an overkill for us. Our storage capacity requirement is probably around 200GB, and we don't see that doubling for at least 5 years. Yet, we need the shared storage for HA/FT.

Thus would really really appreciate any recommendation on my options. Thanks.