The Best Network Setup In My Situation?

[NZCS]

Hi Everyone,

I have been doing a lot of research into optimising my current VM network and thought is wold be good to get the general advice of the VM community. I would like to get the most optimal performance frommy hadware so any advice anyone can pass on would be fantastic:

• From the bottom up we have two host, both are HP DL 380 G7.
  
• Our hosts have 8 nics, 4 onboard and 4 expansion.
  
• Two SAN's (HP P4300). - 2 x NIC's per SAN
  
• We use a seperate switch for the SAN's (16 x port 3Com Baseline Switch 2920-SFP Plus Software Version Release 1101P09).
  
• On the 3COM switch port 1 + 2 and 3 + 4 link aggregated dynamically for the two SAN's
  
• Our main network traffic is on 2 x Netgear GS748TPS
  
• 6 x ports on the GS748TPS setup for LAG's (2 x seperate LAG's with 3 x ports per LAG)
  
• Our VM license is for VMWare Essentials PLUS
  

A diagram of our VM network setup for both hosts (I have all the VM's on one host at present due to some upgrades I am installing):

HOST 1:

 

HOST 2:

Questions:

1. We have 6 VM's (1 x SBS 2011, 2 x Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Terminal Servers, 3 x Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise servers). What would you all recommend as a configuration to get the most optimal performance from my current hardware? We have been having issues with CPU spikes on our terminal servers and I think this may be network related.
   
2. Load Balancing Policies: do we put a load balancing policy on our VMotion and iSCSI networks? If so will this be IP Has?
   
3. iSCSI and VMotion - any best practice advice from the 'trenches' you can give?
   
4. Seperate the network traffic for Service console and VM's?
   
5. Absolutely any advice/guidance will be welcomed! :smileyhappy:
   

Thanks!

Regards,

Glenn

[Mouhamad]

Hello,

I have attached a PDF file with best practices design for a host with 6 NICs. The additional 2 NICs that you have can be added one for iSCSI and another one for VM network.

Good luck,

Mouhamad

[dquintana]

Hello, take care about that:

1. Create a second management port in other network/vlan to prevent HA madness for host isolation
2. Create two or more vmkernel ports for iscsi in order to enable multipathing to the Storage Array.

Regards

Diego Quintana

---
Diego Quintana

[railicnj]

Hi all,

i have similar situation. In other words i have two IBM x3650 servers.

I need help in network configuration for HA. I have problem to decide which is the best configuration.

I have 6 x Eth card and 2xFCS for EMC storage per server.

Option 1.

Three Distributed Network Switches,

dvSwitch-NetworkTraffic 2 x Eth

dvSwitch-FT Fault Tolerance 2 x Eth

dvSwitch-Vmotion Trafic 2 x Eth (Management console)

Option 2.

dvSwitch-NetworkTraffic 3 x Eth

dvSwitch-VM-Kernels 3 x Eth (vMotion, Fault Tolerance, Management Console)

Option 3.

dvSwitch-NetworkTraffic 4 x Eth

dvSwitch-VM-Kernels 2 x Eth (vMotion, Fault Tolerance, Management Console)

I have two CISCO switches and i want to have full redudancy,and I have vSphere Enterprise Plus licence.

Which is the best option?

[dquintana]

Option 2.

dvSwitch-NetworkTraffic 3 x Eth

dvSwitch-VM-Kernels 3 x Eth (vMotion, Fault Tolerance, Management Console)

maybe this one.

[logiboy123]

I recommend the following reading.

Networking:

http://www.kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vsphere-host-nic-design-6-nics.html

iSCSI:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/09/a-multivendor-post-on-using-iscsi-with-vmware-vsphere.html

For me I would go with something like the following;

vSwitch0

2 x 1GB NIC - Management & vMotion network where load balancing is configured as

Management - vmnic0 active / vmnic4 standby

vMotion - vmnic0 standby / vmnic4 active

vSwitch1

2 x 1GB NIC - iSCSI network where load balancing is configured to

vmk1 - vmnic1 active / vmnic5 disabled

vmk2 - vmnic1 disabled / vmnic5 active

vSwitch2

2 x 1GB NIC - VM Networking

Then I would keep 2 NIC's for DEV or POC or DMZ or Backups or Hot Spare.

Each 1GB assigned as active for the vMotion network will allow vSphere to automatically do up to 4 simultaneous vMotions at the same time.

You are using ESX, rebuild these systems as ESXi so you can get used to this OS as ESX will not be available in vSphere 5 which is coming out very soon.

Regards,

Paul