EMC VMWare ESX Proof of Concept

[vspheruser]

Hi Everyone,

I am building a new network infrastructure. The goal is to create a fully redundant, highly available, high throughput network with EMC and VMware ESX. I've put together a diagram of the plan. It's also posted at EMCVMWareESXfor other user feedbacks. Please let me know your thoughs.

Few things that I'm wondering:

1. Would it be too intensive if I used the same NIC for HA heartbeat and Vmotion? I have 2 for redundancy and splitting the load across.

2. What disk RAID level should I use for the VM OS?

3. Will it be safe to Virtualize Web servers and SQL servers? I plan to virtualize Windows 2008 IIS7 and Windows 2008 SQL 2008 Enterprise.

Thank you.

[AntonVZhbankov]

You have single point of failure - storage.

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MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[vspheruser]

Could you please tell me where the single point of failure is Anton? The hosts are connected to an EMC CX 320c iSCSI SAN which has dual controllers. The virtual machines will reside on RAID volumes (haven't decided 10, 1, or 5 yet). Thank you.

[AntonVZhbankov]

What I saw from the picture - design was made for metrocluster, with two near locations.

One location goes down - power off, and your entire system goes down if storage is in this location.

---

MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[vspheruser]

Thanks for your clarification. All this is actually in one datacenter. You have a good point though, nowadays we have to prepare for geographical redundancy. I'll add that to the todo list. Other than that, do you see any point of failure here? Am I going overboard with the network cards? Thanks.