The Systems Architech Dual-NIC VMware VI3 Setup.
I was currently plagued with the responsibility of designing a robust VI3 environment on a blade platform. The biggest hurdle was that the blade chassis only supported two in-chassis switches (resulting in two vmnic’s). Those switches could have a max aggregate bandwidth of 4GB or 10GB, depending on the cabling used, so bandwidth wasn’t the problem.
The biggest problem was, how do you provide a robust ethernet connection while still offering some segmentation of Virtual Machine, Service Console and VMotion traffic (assuming these were already on separate VLANs).
The answer I come up with lies below.
The Virtual Switch “vKernel.”
The Virtual Switch will have both vmnic0 and vmnic1 bound to it and both set active.
Service Console.
A portgroup on the, “vKernel” virtual switch will be created using the appropriate VLAN. Default NIC failover is overridden with the following:
vmnic0 = Active.
vmnic1 = Standby.
VMotion.
A portgroup on the, “vKernel” virtual switch will be created using the appropriate VLAN. Default NIC failover is overridden with the following:
vmnic0 = Active.
vmnic1 = Standby.
Virtual Machines.
A portgroup on the, “vKernel” virtual switch will be created using the appropriate VLAN. Default NIC failover is overridden with the following:
vmnic0 = Standby.
vmnic1 = Active.
How it works.
All Service Console and VMotion traffic will travel out through vmnic0 (chassis switch 1, 4×1GB links, for example) unless that switch fails, in which case, it will use the standby, vmnic1 (chassis switch 2).
Visa versa for the Virtual Machine traffic where it will use vmnic1 by default and failover to its standby, vmnic0, if required.
- Jason Langone
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2007 Systems Architech.