Best Design for 8 x 1 Gb NICs with 3 Port Groups

[TheVMinator]

I am using blade servers with the following configuration:

4 on-board NICs

4 NICs on a single Mezzanine card.

On some blades, I need to split these 3  traffic types among them:

• Production Traffic
• vMotion Traffic
• Backup Traffic

What is the best design for this scenario?

Which traffic should go on which NICs?

Which should use Active / Active vs Active / Standby?

Thanks!

[TheVMinator]

anyone?

[HeathReynolds]

I would do :

Onboard 1 - MGMT active, vMotion standby

Onboard 1 - Backup active

Onboard 1 - Prod active

Onboard 1 - Prod active

Mez 1 - Prod active

Mez 2 - Prod active

Mez 3 - Backup active

Mez 4 - vMotion active, MGMT standby

Assuming your backup traffic is coming from multiple adapters and con benefit from active / active. You can also run multi-NIC vMotion, which you may need depending on how big your largest VM is and how much RAM is in the hosts.

[TheVMinator]

OK thanks.  The biggest VM is 32GB and there is 256 GB of RAM on the host and 15 VMs per host.  Do you think I need multi-nic vmotion and how would that change this?

[HeathReynolds]

Here is a multi-NIC vMotion how to in 5.5 web client :

http://www.heathreynolds.com/2014/02/multi-nic-vmotion-on-esxi-55.html

Here is a deck with info on multi-NIC vMotion in 5.0 / 5.1 with VI client.

http://www.heathreynolds.com/2012/08/my-presentation-from-inf-net2227-at.html

I would use two gig nics in that situation. I've run into trouble with VMs with 32GB of RAM under heavy load. The vMotion will normally complete, but processes on the box can hang up. Once we went multi-NIC we had no trouble migrating the same box.

Make sure you have a dedicated vMotion VLAN, no other VMkernel interfaces.

[TheVMinator]

ok thanks