Excellent articles. I’ve learnt alot! Thankyou

with regards to IP storage, how do you setup Active and Passive pNIC’s outlined in your example? I’m hoping to do this with my setup.

100% agreed with the management vs performance statement. To makes things worse from a management perspective it must be noticed that if you use the guest-based iSCSI functionalities you do need a “local” boot/disk (c:\) coming from your non-iSCSI storage and then you can map an additional disk (d:\) that you can apply your advanced MPIO algorithms to. Very big mess in my opinion.

Massimo.

Many thanks for this set of articles, which I’ve just spent an hour or so reading. Very informative indeed and provides an excellent insight into the numerous configuration options for managing networking in VMWare.

One observation: In these days of reducing IT cost and complexity, having an eight pNIC server for a non-IP storage solution seems, well, a little extravagant, especially when only half of the ports are devoted to serving “front facing” traffic. Combining management (low traffic, high availability) with VMotion (high traffic, low availability) on separate port groups seems a very logical solution, reducing the number of NICs and, almost more importantly, switch ports required by the solution with very few drawbacks.

Excellent stuff!

Daern

Yes, in Fig 3 there are two port groups and I would recommend the use of different VLANs to logically separate the traffic. Notice that in Fig 1 I have the SC & VMotion on separate vSwitches. In a “perfect world” every network would have at least two pNICs on its own vSwitch. This provides the greatest degree of isolation and also gives fault tolerance. In Fig 3, I combined them onto a single vSwitch (on different VLANs) to provide more pNICs for use by the intra-VM iSCSI initiator.

So, my recommendation is:

- If you have enough pNICs to provide maximum isolation and still have the fault tolerance you need, create separate vSwitches.
- If you don’t have enough pNICs, then combine networks based on the performance/sensitivity matrix approach I discussed in Part 5 (http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/the-great-vswitch-debate-part-5/)

You could throw all the pNICs into a single vSwitch and use port group settings to set active/standby/unused adapters, but I don’t like the complexity if that approach. I’m a simple guy and like simple setups – multiple vSwitches make me happy

Hope this helps,
KLC

Thanks for the great posts. Good and easy reading. I have a question regarding Figure 3. You show there using 1 vSwitch and running both VMotion and the SC on there. I am assuming you would be using Vlan trunking to isolate the networks for each. My question is when would you want to create individual vSwitches as opposed to hosting them on the same vSwitch?

-Jason

Thanks, I finally got around to fixing the graphics!

KLC

That’s why writers need editors (and I don’t have one for the blog!!)

KLC

Thanks for directly answering my question, that was very generous of you. I came up with a similar diagram with vMotion and CSO on vSwitch0 (why do your diagrams always look better than mine?). Perhaps the next version of ESX will support MPIO, who knows, maybe it’ll be part of the vSphere 4 announcement this morning. I do appreciate your soapbox comment about only using this if you really need it as it does add yet another layer of complexity. I have setup MPIO in physical Win 2003 and Win 2008 along with off-host backups using hardware VSS providers and when you are done you end up with a somewhat complicated setup. I would not want to use it more than absolutely necessary in our VMs.

Regards,

-Rob D. (AKA RobVM)