NIC assignment / network design ESXi hosts - how would u do it?

[valicon]

Hi All,

I have two ESXi hosts with 12 NICs each. I have installed ESXi on each and have vSphere 5. My setup looks like this:

[ESXi1]-------------------------|Production  |

                                             |Switch LAN|

(ESXi2]-------------------------|                     |

                                                    |  |

                                                    |  |

                                                    |  |

[NetAPP SAN]                          |  |

[ 1 SATA SHELF]------------------  | <---Vif0 etherchanneled back to switch for CIFS

                                                       |

[1 SAS SHELP]----------------------  <---Vif0 etherchanneled back to switch

Please excuse my crude diagram. Currently the two ESXi hosts have two NICs each teamed and connected to our Production LAN switch. I have not placed them in a vlan as of yet. VIF0 on my SATA shelf of the NetApp is etherchanneled back to our Production LAN switch for CIFS. VIF0 on the SAS shelf is etherchanneled back to the Production LAN switch. Both SAN etherchannel connections are in a vlan.

My question is how should I properly connect the ESXi hosts and best utilize the remaining 10 NICs on each host? I plan to use vMotion. How should I design the vlans for the ESXi hosts? Basically what I am asking is how to best utilize my resources and best practice. How would you design this. The SAN is NFS.

Also my production network is a 192.168.5.x network. Once I start creating VMs they will need to be on the same subnet, so do I just assign them 5.x IP addresses like I would on a physical switch and does the vSwitch need a 5.x IP as well?

Any help, suggestions or insight with this would be great. I want to design this in the best possible way.

Thanks again

[mrrex4]

I'm sure everyone has their own style of doing things; however, if I was in your shoes I would start by splitting the different services onto separate sets of NICs.  For example, I would put your vmk0 adapter on two dedicated NICs on a VLAN dedicated to just host management.  This VLAN does not need to be seen by the rest of your company.  I would do the same thing for your vSphere vMotion virtual adapter.  Once you have these interfaces setup, I would begin watching your traffic load.  If you find that you are maxing your interfaces on a regular basis, add another NIC or two to your virtual switch to increase bandwidth.  Don't forget to properly configure your hardware switch to maximize the use of your redundant NICs.

Hopefully that gives you some direction.  G'luck.

[marcelo_soares]

Adding... also, 2 nics for NFS and the other 6 you can organize the way you prefer for the VMs. With this you are better than good to go and should have no problem with your virtualized environment. The vMotion network also can be used for FT if you want (don't mix NFS with vMotion/FT if possible).