Hello,
I am designing a new solution and want to get the best performance/usage/redundancy/practices out of our hardware(mainly network side). The area I am having most of the questions with is the network configuration. I have several ideas in mind but was wondering if there is a better solution and generally what everyone else thinks. Here is a quick break down.
Hardware:
Dell Servers - 5 - R610(2x quad port NIC's, dual port FC HBA for storage connectivity)
CIsco 3750e - 2 - clustered
EMC VNX5300 - shared storage
We currently do not have a requirement for Fault Tolerance but I would like to implement it now rather than later since we will be using vSphere Enterprise anyways.
I was thinking to split up the physical NIC's like this for all the servers which gives us the most redundancy.
2 ports for Management - Active/Active(1 port on NIC1 connected to Cisco switch1, 1 port on NIC2 connected to Cisco switch2)
2 ports for vMotion - Active/Active(1 port on NIC1 connected to Cisco switch1, 1 port on NIC2 connected to Cisco switch2)
2 ports for FT - Active/Active(1 port on NIC1 connected to Cisco switch1, 1 port on NIC2 connected to Cisco switch2)
2 ports for VMs - Active/Active(1 port on NIC1 connected to Cisco switch1, 1 port on NIC2 connected to Cisco switch2)
I was thinking seperate vLANS for Management, vMotion, and FT, and use our existing VM network with our current production vLANs used for server traffic already.
Today, our server/vm traffic network has 4 physical NICs dedicated to VM traffic, which are trunked and have access to about 6 different vLANs(some DMZ, Firewalled off, etc...) The NIC teaming policy we use for Load Blancing is: Route based on IP hash.
What do most people do?
I know not everyone buys 8 port NICs to get this setup, or uses 10GE(which we don't). I read that VMware recommends seperate switches for vMotion and management if possible, which is outside our budget, but vLANs will work.
What is the best Load Balancing policy to use?
Is there a special way or a best practice on the Cisco side to setup the ports besides trunking mode and access to the available vLANs?
If anyone can provide some experience in this setup that would be great. Let me know if you need any more information. Thanks in advance.