How many NICs/Subnets do you use on your VMware ESXi hosts?

langenoir

Is it really an unnecessary best practice to use separate nics and subnets on ESXi VMK port groups? Why do I have to keep fighting to get more nics for my VMK ports?

“We run two 10 Gig on all of our ESXi servers and they’re fine.”

Yeah well we’ve been doing that for a year and just had two crashes in the last six months due to network congestion. If VMware says separate your Management traffic, VM traffic, vMotion, and iSCSI do it! Or don’t complain when s h i t breaks!

joelsfood

I run all UCS, so some are "single" nics that actually failover between fabric.

Vmotion - single nic
Data - Dual nic, one on each fabric
iSCSI - Dual Nic, one on each fabric
DMZ (if needed) - Dual NIC, one on each fabric

All 10gb VNICS

Cable_guy

We either run two 10GB cards, or 5 1GB connections, all trunked.

Subnets.... we have lots as we are a VERY large company.

Essendon

I have 2 NICs for all traffic, one on each fabric.

Virtualization's been around for so long, I'm regularly astounded by the number of technical people that don't have a clue about it. Just the other day, I had someone asking their 2 Exchange mailbox servers to have 16 vCPU's and 128GB RAM reserved. Scale out Exchange, not scale up.

vMotion's a bursty mechanism, it must be separated from other types of traffic. Or if you cant, then for the love of God, use a vDS (if licensed, of course) and employ NIOC. Someone I know vMotioned a few large VM's over a 1GB link in a metrocluster and all hell broke loose..

darkerosxx

2 10Gbps links is a VMware best practice, actually. Once you hit that level, they don't recommend adding more to separate out traffic, unless your specific situation requires it to not hit contention, and even then you can use VMware features to help with that instead of using more NIC's. Everything else the same, though, 2 10Gbps NIC's is a best practice, from VMware's mouth.