Bladecenter s

[joanpm]

I have 3 blades running esx4i, each with 4 pnics. I have 4 networks - SC, vmotion, LAN, and DMZ. I am looking for the best network setup for redundancy and performance. I have attached a proposed setup. I am also not sure where I need vlans or tagging. The bladecenter has 2 nortel switches in bays 1 and 2.

[sketchy00]

My suggestion would be to go to http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/the-great-vswitch-debate-part-1/ and print out the 8 part series on vswitches, port groups, and how to optimally configure your NICS based on how many pNICs are available. It's worth printing out every article and reading it several times over.

If you are using blades, you need to find out if they are 4 seperate NIC's or 2 dual port NIC's (quite common on blade form factors). If the latter is the case, then you have to be very careful about how you are creating your redundancy. In other words, you wouldn't want to think that you have a redundant connection for say, your LAN, only to realize that you bound both ports that are coming off of the same phsical card.

Are you dealing with iSCSI, or FC for your shared storage?

[joanpm]

I will check out the series, thanks for the link.

I believe vmnic 0 and vmnic1 are on i/o module1, and vmnic2 and 3 are on I/O module2. So I created vswitch0 with vmnic0 and 2 for physical nics, and two portgroups - SC and vmotion. I set each to explicitly use a seperate nic and failover to each others nic.

Same for vswitch1 - used vmnic 1 and 3, two portgroups for LAN and DMZ. Again each set to use 1 phys nic and failover to the other.

This should cover me in case of I/O module failure.

Storage is internal to the blade chasis - SAS drives.

[sketchy00]

Sounds like you are going in the right direction.

That 8 part series lays it out better than any other book, video, or blog post I've seen on the subject matter. It may take a few (or many) reads to thoroughly absorb everything, but it's good stuff.