VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vlans’

VI3 Enterprise features VMotion, DRS, and HA require identical virtual networking settings on all of your ESX hosts. Unfortunately, VirtualCenter does not apply a central configuration policy or inheritance of settings from the cluster. Maybe a future version of VirtualCenter will evolve to include global configuration abilities? Until such a version is created, each ESX server’s virtual networking settings will continue to be configured individually by most administrators. However, there are some time saving, global configuration options available today. This post summarizes two methods provided by the virtualization community for creating PortGroups simultaneously across multiple ESX hosts. Read the rest of this entry »

I get asked this all the time. “How many NICs does ESX need? 2, 4, 6 or more?”

Well, it’s not really about how many NICs ESX needs. I’m not recommending it, but the fact of the matter is that VI3 really only needs 1 NIC per ESX host. It’s just smarter for a company to build some redundancy and load balancing into their VI design. So, let’s say then that ESX just needs 2 NICs minimum.

The real question is “How many NICs does your network infrastructure and VI performance require?” Do you have or will you have: Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I have to work with a customer’s networking engineers, or even my own Cisco consultants, I get funny looks when I have to tell them that there is not much to the nic teaming configuration on an ESX server.

Once a vSwitch is created it’s just a matter of assigning multiple physical NICs, creating port groups with the assigned VLANs, and setting the right policy. To the disbelief of the network guys, that can be done without adding any driver utilities or third party management software. After that ESX will load balance traffic headed out of the ESX host to the physical switch and provide redundancy for NIC fail over. Up to this point no changes to the switch are even needed.

On the physical switch side it does require more involved set up to provide inbound load balancing and setting up an ether channel. There are many guides already available on how to do this. Here are a few for reference:

ESX Server, NIC Teaming, and VLAN Trunking – blog.scottlowe.org

VMware ESX Server 3 802.1Q VLAN Solutions