Installing vSphere on Blade Server

[bhoff2025]

Hello All,

This is my first time installing any versione of VMware on a blade server and I have a problem. Each blade in the blade center only has 2 NIC's dedicated to it. I was wondering how I would go about having the service console, vmkernel and virtual machine port groups all exist with just 2 physical NIC's. I don't have all of the info about the blade server yet but I do know it is an IBM. Any help here would be appreciated

[mikeyhoward]

Is this going to be a production server?

I'd strongly recommend additional NICs for your ESX hosts. Whilst it is possible to configure with 2 NICs it is not recommended.

If testing only, you could put your SC and VM network on one vSwitch with 1 NIC and the VMK on another vSwitch with the other NIC.

[bhoff2025]

Hey Mikey,

Thanks for the quick response. This is going to be a production server and I am onsite now and found out it is an IBM Bladecenter H. Looking at the back of the server there are 2 NICS for each along with 2 Fiber Channel HBA's. I am going to check out IBM's site also to see if there is a solution because someone has to be using these things for virtualization. I know it isn't best practice to have SC and VM network on the same NIC I'm worried I may have to set it up this way

[mikeyhoward]

Unfortunately I don't have a great deal of experience with IBM blades, but with HP BLades you would purchase additional Virtual Connect (Ethernet) cards, and then create a profile which includes these NICs and assign that profile to the blades.

[bhoff2025]

Mikey,

Thanks again. I am working on a project away from our office for a few days and the customer won't be able to get a solution like that before I leave but I will pass along the info. In a perfect world I know I'd like to see at least 3 NIC's because they have a FC SAN and even more would allow me to have redundant connections for things but it isn't possible on this trip. Whoever spec'ed out this bladecenter didn't really put much though into it. Thanks again for all of your help

[a2alpha]

We have deployed a vmware environment with an IBM HS21 Bladecenter with the 8853 blades. Each blade has two internal NICs which connect through the blade internal connectors to the two switches in the blade chassis. This is then attached to a DS4700 SAN.

We created one vSwitch with both blade nics as Uplinks for it. On this switch we have the vmkernel portgroup, the service console, 2 DMZ's and the main LAN. On the chassis switches, we configured three VLANs, One for the main network, one for the first DMZ and then the second DMZ. In the port groups we put the corresponding VLAN ID. The external ports on the chassis switches are then plugged into the different parts of our network.

We have 14 blades, 10 in production and 4 for our testing, and about 60 VMs. We have never had an issue with this setup. The network speeds don't seem slower than their physical counterparts and the environment feels quite speedy.

If you already have blades with only two NICs I would definately test it as is. Depending on how much load you put on each blade, you might be fine. VLAN certainly is the way to go.

Hope this helps,

Dan

[rakeshmani78]

Can someone help me to undestand licensing in case of using blade servers ?

suppose , blade server has 3 blades with 2 physical core in ech blade , how many CPU license , I need to purchase ?

[enDemand]

rakeshmani78, licensing is consistent regardless of blade form factor, make or model. ESX is licensed per CPU socket. So if you have a 2-socket (or 2-way) blade server, you need qty (2) of the 1 CPU ESX license for the edition that you plan on running. So if you have 3 blade servers, regardless of how many cores (dual-core, quad-core, or even single-core CPUs), you must license each physical CPU socket in that blade server.