Moving to ESXi 5.1...need config help, pls...(NIC Teaming question too)...

[GEH3]

Hello everybody,

We've been running  ESXi 4.x for years here, it's been rock solid.

Well, the time has come to move to 5.1 and needless to say, it has gotten WAAAY more convoluted!  After much pain, I have a new 5.1 vCenter up and running (and all of it's components).  I still have our old vCenter 4.1 server up with some older Sun/Oracle machines and two Dell R910s as the hosts. My new VMware environment consists of  2 new Dell R910 servers to replace the old Sun hosts, plus I want to move the two R910's that are currently on my 4.1 vCenter to the 5.1 server and upgrade them to ESXi 5.1. (They would be two separate clusters.)

My first stumbling block (after getting vCenter 5.1 up and running) is cleanly adding the brand new R910's to vCenter and have the new vDS working properly.  Unfortunately, with all of the documentation out there, I cannot seem to find a straightforward "How-To" for the most basic of setups. 😞

Our R910's have 6 NICs (4 Broadcom 1Gbps, 2 Intel 10Gbps).  We currently have a stack of HP 2810 1G switches, but will eventually move to Cisco 3750 switches.

I set up 4 portgroups in my vDS (one each: PG-Vms, PG-FT, PG-vMotion, and PG-Mgmt) for each of the different "types" of traffic.  Do I need to associate the different "profiles" to the different portgroups? (If so, how do I do that?) Should I restrict the individual ports (upLinks) to the different port groups, or do I just let the intelligence of the vDS do it's magic?  Can I team a 1G and a 10G nic together and get 11G (with failover) or should I just set it up with the 10G as primary with the 1G as secondary?  Is it a bad thing to plug all of the NICs into the same switch or stack? (I have heard conflicting stories...so it really isn't as dumb a question as it sounds.)

I am going to the official vSphere training, but that isn't until March...and unfortunately, I need to get these clusters up and running now. 😞

Any help y'all can offer would be GREATLY appreciated! (Even if it's as simple as "here is the link to the How-To doc, you big dummy!") 🙂

Thanks,

Emmett

[vmroyale]

Note: Discussion successfully moved from VMware ESXi 5 to vSphere Upgrade & Install

[GEH3]

I guess another appropriate question would be:

Does it make sense to even bother with vDS, or should I just go with vSS?

I should have problably mentioned that we will eventually be linking the 5.1 vCenter to another vCenter in another facility.

Thanks,

Emmett

[Gortee]

I guess another appropriate question would be:

Does it make sense to even bother with vDS, or should I just go with vSS?

I should have problably mentioned that we will eventually be linking the 5.1 vCenter to another vCenter in another facility.

->It all really depends on your setup.  If you use a lot of port groups (I use over 1000) then vDS is really great to make sure you sync configuration.  If you use one port group and only have two hosts vSS is a lot easier.  Vmware is putting a lot of time and effort development wise into the vDS and we continue to see improvements over time so it might be worth going to it to future proof yourself.  Also since your paying for it why not use it.  I'll see if I can help you with more upgrade steps a little later on.

Please feel free to ask more questions.

Thanks,

[Sreec]

Hi,

    If you plans to implement Vcloud Director,i would suggest you to go ahead and start making use of VDS .VSwitch doesn't provide much functionality when you integrate with VCD.