We are planning on upgrading our core switch and some of our distribution level switches. I am looking to determine the best way to protect the VMware installation during periods of intermittent network connectivity.
I suspect the preferred course of action is to shut down the VM environment. I have seen some documentation of doing that and it looks like a straight forward procedure. I would prefer to avoid this because we are running Active Directory directory services and I haven’t been able to locate any documentation on how to shut down all of the Domain Controllers in an Active Directory domain.
We are running ESXi 5.0 U1 and have 2 VCenter datacenters. One consists of 4 hosts and the other has 7 hosts. Each VMkernel Port Group is backed by 2 physical nics redundantly connected to separate switches or switch blades.
There are 2 scenarios I have questions about. In the first, when we take down a switch chassis for replacement we will lose all iSCSI connectivity. I am thinking we should take our VM environment prior to taking down the switch. Is this correct?
In the second scenario, the Vmotion and Management port groups, as well as most of the production network ports are connected to the 2 separate switches. I am thinking that if we take one switch down that the connections would fail-over to the working switch but the VMware environment would be functional if somewhat degraded.
Any comments on either scenario?