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NIC change on hosts - best practice for vMotion / Managment

  • 1.  NIC change on hosts - best practice for vMotion / Managment

    Posted May 07, 2020 10:40 PM

    Hello,

    We are going to replace the 4 x 1GB NIC Mezzanine cards in our 4 ESXi hosts with new 4 x 10 GB cards. The four NICs on the mezzanine card currently have the vMotion and Management networks connected to them. VM network traffic is through 2 x 10 GB NICs on each host.  We will need to move vMotion and Management networks to the two 10 GB NICs while the cards are replaced.

    Given that vMotion traffic can saturate a link, the question I have is whether it is better to a) set traffic filtering on the two vMotion portgroups and  then assign their vmnic's to the two 10 GB NICs or b) should I assign the VM network and Managment network to one of the 10GB NICs and the vMotion network to the other 10 GB NIC?

    4 ESXi hosts with 3 distributed switches:

    1 switch for VM network traffic:

        10 GB NIC - VM network - vmnic0

        10 GB NIC - VM network - vmnic1

    1 switch for Management traffic with 1 portgroup:

        1 GB NIC - Management network - vmnic2

        1 GB NIC - Management network - vmnic3

    1 switch for vMotion traffic with 2 portgroups:

        1 GB NIC - vMotion network - vmnic4

        1 GB NIC - vMotion network - vmnic5

    Thank you,

    Paul Murphy