best practice for setting up VSA

[baton]

My vmware licensing is essential plus which does not have the vmotion. Atached is my networking I have setup. any advise on how to setup networking between 2 cisco switches to provide HA at maximum knowing the limitation of my license. Each ESX has 8 NICs

Thanks in advance

[Steven Clementi]

Best Practice would be to have seperate vSwitches for different services.

Currently, you have you Service Console sharing nics with a VM network and on the other vswitch, you have just your VSA/iSCSI stuff.

First: Are you presenting storage to your ESX servers from the VSA?

Second: What model Servers do you have? and what is the nic configuration? (2 quad port nices? 4 dual port nics? 2 onboard nics and varying cards?)

You have 8 NICS... you can do:

vSwitch0: Service Console (2 nics for redundancy)
vSwitch1: VM Network (2 or 4 nics for Redundancy and/or Load Balancing/Sharing)
vSwitch2: iSCSI Network (2 nices for redundancy)

Without knowing the types of nics you have, i'm refrain from guessing and wait for more info before I suggest a configuration.

[baton]

I have 2 esx servers with local vmfs storage.
first is where service console installed and second with 4mb block is for iSCSI VSA

so if I understood correctly the setup you proposing:

vSwitch0 - Service Console only. No Virtual Machine Port Group. 2 Nics split between 2 physical switches.
vSwitch1- Virtual machine Port Group- this is where all VMs will be placed for exception of VSA. Admin guide recommends VSA to be placed on iSCSI network. 2 or 4 NICs split between the 2 physical switches.
vSwith2 iSCSI network. i.e iSCSI VMkernel, iSCSI Service Console and iSCSI network for VSA. 2 NICS split between 2 physical switches.

Correct?
any vSwitch policies to configure to provide better network flaw or redundancy?
jumbo frames?

[Phillip Thayer]

Baton,

You should always use Jumbo frames with iSCSI. Also, make sure that the physical network switches that your iSCSI traffic are non-blocking switches. This means that each port will be able to use the amount of memory it needs to use without getting an error on the port. If you are not using non-blockiong switches for iSCSI it can be unreliable.

Phil

[baton]

how is Jumbo frames help for iSCSI traffic?
also is iSCSI traffic has to be on diffrent vSwitch then VMs or it can be on the same?

[baton]

only alows me to attach one at the time

[baton]

3 vswitches setup

what is the best way to design virtual networking

[Steven Clementi]

"First: Are you presenting storage to your ESX servers from the VSA?

Second: What model Servers do you have? and what is the nic configuration? (2 quad port nices? 4 dual port nics? 2 onboard nics and varying cards?)
"

Can you provide more detail on the type of servers (model, make, nic configuration, etc)

As for the first question I asked... I am referring to the presentation of storage FROM the VSA TO the ESX servers via iSCSI...

OR are you simply going to present storage VIA iSACSI to the VM's running on the ESX servers?


Steven

[baton]

VSA will be installed on each of the ESX servers. Yes, I am presenting the iSCSI storage from VSA to ESX servers. One single LUN. vmfs has 4 MB block. All VM servers will be placed on iSCSI LUN presented from VSA. The goal is to provide HA for a storage so If one ESX fails I am not to lose any VMs.

Dell r710 each with 8 NICs, 2 quds CPU, 28 GB RAM.

Thank you for you help.