Blade trunking with vmware

[paulbrear]

Hi Guys, Looking at blades for vmware and am curious - can we use the 10Gb ports to trunk chassis together to allow vmotion over this? How have you handled the bandwidth issues for LAN and SAN I/O ? If you have n+2 config with 14 blades, if you stacked with 5 VM clients each you have 70 servers running out of the VC module. with trunking etc, how do know the bandwidth is enough? I hope i am correct in saying there are only 4 ports(1GB) for LAN (if using redundancy) so a 4GB trunk for 70 servers seems small ? Am i way off base with this? Thanks Paul

[mkendall]

Paul, I have forwarded your question on to our VC experts! Regards, Mike

[mlance]

Paul, For your first question regarding VMware, If you configure an 10Gb link as a data center uplink on one enclosure and then do the same for the second enclosure, you can connect the two and use it for this purpose. The net result would be isolated network shared only between those two enclosures. Regarding bandwidth management for LAN and SAN I/O, the primary benefits of 'stacking enclosures' (not yet available in the current firmware) is cable reduction. We will be provided better ways to simplify VC management of many c-Class enclosures. If you are using VC in a bandwidth intensive environment, it would not make a lot of sense to 'stack' the enclosures, but instead take Ethernet uplinks directly out of each separate enclosure. The VC-Enet module has 16Gb of downlinks to servers and 38Gb of uplink and stacking connections, it is fairly straightforward to create a configuration that provides the appropriate level of over/under subscription of the uplinks for just about any environment. The FC module will support from 4:1 to 16:1 oversubscription of uplinks with HH servers (2:1 to 8:1 with FH servers). Thanks for your inquiries! Mike