Hey Guys,
Just wanted to get some feedback on this setup for some hosts I'm building soon. The hosts I have 2 x quad port nics (1 onboard, 1 pcie - a grand total of 8 1GigE ports) and we've decided to dedicate 3 physical nics for both management and vmotion.
The intention is to use two physical ports on the onboard quad card for dedicated roles: one for management, the other for vmotion. These will both connect to the same switch. The quad port pcie nic will have 1 physical port that will be used for both vmotion and management and connect to the second switch. Thereby multi-nic vmotion will be able to run across two physical ports and two physical switches, and management traffic will also have the potential to use two physical nics and the two switches. This setup should still be able to maintain management and vmotion connectivity in the event of either a nic or switch failure.
802.11q will be used to segregate the management and vmotion networks as the three vmk ports and three physical nics will all reside in the same vSwitch.
I'm struggling to identify any serious issues with this setup but thought I'd put it to the community for feedback. So can you see any blatant issues with the above setup that I may have missed?
I know the setup isn't "symmetrical" in cabling to switches etc, but I don't see that really affecting performance much.
Thanks in advance!