Best way to utilize 3 NICs

[sens007]

I actually have 4 NICs available but I think 3 will suffice.

- Standalone ESX for now (will probably add it to VC later down the road)

- No access to SAN, storage is all local

I have one NIC for the service console. What should I do w/ the other two NICs? Teaming or active/passive for the VMs? If my SC is on vswitch0, do I need to create another vswitch for my virtual machine traffic (eth1 and eth2)?

[a_p_]

Depends on your network configuration. Are the VMs and the Management in the same IP subnet? Are you using VLANs?

If everything is in the same subnet, just attach the NICs to one vSwitch with 2 port groups (Management and VM Network) and leave all the NICs active.

André

[golddiggie]

As Andre said, it does depend upon your network topology... If you have a flat network (where all subnets can communicate freely), with more than one switch in place, then I would leave the Management Network on it's own vSwitch (0), add a second pNIC (not on the same controller as the other if possible) and then place the two remaining ports into another vSwitch, active/active, for VM traffic to use. You can set the Management Network ports into active/standby so that you don't need to worry there either. With the VM ports in active/active, you'll have best performance...

So if you have two NIC's (either two ports onboard, with an additional dual port or two single port NIC's) use one of the onboard in each vSwitch along with one of the ports from the add-on card... If it's all onboard, then I would alternate pNIC ports used. Such as 1 and 3 for vSwitch0 and 2 and 4 for vSwitch1.

It's never a bad idea to eliminate single points of failure (or build in redundancy) in a host configuration.

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[sens007]

Same subnet and no VLAN.

[a_p_]

In this case I would use 1 vSwitch and attach the 3 NICs to it to have full redundancy. With default settings the uplinks are distributed by "Route based on originating port ID" which basically means Round-Robin.

André

[sens007]

so i shouldn't attempt to separate the SC from the VM traffic?

[a_p_]

Since you are running on the same subnet anyway, I don't see a real benefit. If you want to separate it, you would have to use all 4 NICs in order to have both vSwitches (which you would have in this case) redundant.

André

[golddiggie]

I run my vCenter Server on my ESXi 4.1 host (in my home lab environment)... As such, that's the ONLY VM that's on vSwitch0... All the other VM's are on vSwitch1, as shown in the screenshot...

In production environments I also leave VM's off the vSwitch that has the Management Network on it... This has served me very well in both configuration types... I'm running a flat network here (at the home lab) with just one pSwitch (no VLAN's either)... I do, at some point, expect to have a second pSwitch though, so I'm primed to bring that onboard at any time...

VMware VCP4

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[a_p_]

Just thought about it one more time.

To have full redundancy and a separation of the traffic you could use 1 vSwitch with the 3 NICs as uplinks and configure the vmnics on the port groups in active/stand-by mode.

- Management - vmnic0 active, vmnic1 and 2 stand-by

- VM Network - vmnic1 and 2 active, vmnic0 stand-by

This way the traffic is separated and in case of a failure you stay still connected.

André