Newby needs question answered around VMWare Networking

You haven't said what the underlying network infrastructure is for your environment.

I would suggest that you VLAN everything to make sure your networks are segmented correctly.

[quote]Single adapter and vswitch for VMNetwork[end quote]
[quote]Three adapters and vswitch for corp network access[end quote]

Unless you have something else in mind for your VMNetwork, you could  collapse these together and use four ports for all your virtual machines and corporate LAN access.

jakethecatuk, thanks for your reply and be gentile, as I said, I'm new to all of this.

The underlying network is a singe gigabit network on a single subnet. What VMWare services need to be segmented out to networks other than my corp network? I know the VMotion network wants to be on a separate segment but what about the others? I assume they are all happy on the same subnet as the rest?

you can leave everything on the same subnet, but you will be pumping a shed load of data around the same subnet and you MAY find that performance will be impacted.

what sort of network switches do you have and do they support VLAN's?

At home, I have two VM servers and an iSCSI SAN.  I have split my network out as follows: -

VLAN 1 - all normal traffic (workstations, fileserver, AD, exchange etc)
VLAN 2 - DMZ for websites and internet facing servers
VLAN10 - internet connection
VLAN20 - vMotion
VLAN21 - VM fault tolerance
VLAN40 - iSCSI

For example, iSCSI.  If the iSCSI network is on your main backbone, someone could quite easily point their client at the iSCSI servers and try and map an iSCSI drive (ok - this can be prevented by using CHAP etc - but you get the general idea)

The main advantage of splitting them out is to keep traffic separate and if your switches support VLAN's, give it consideration.

You will also have more IP's to play around with.

My question lies more around configuring the network adapters on the hosts of the VMWare cluster. Lets just say for now that I cannot use VLANs. What would your recomentation be for allocating the 8 netwrok adapters in each host, given I am using iSCSI and VMotion?

Dedicated adatpter (vswitch) for VMWare Management
Dedicated adapter (vswitch) for VMotion
two teamed adapters (vswitch) for iSCSI traffic
four teamed adapters (vswitch) for LAN and VMNetwork traffic

Thanks

that will work ok

you will need to give IP addresses to your VMware server, one for vMotion, one for iSCSI (even though you have two adapters).

I would recommend the following


two  adatpter (vswitch) for VMWare Management
two adapter (vswitch) for VMotion
two teamed adapters (vswitch) for iSCSI traffic
two  teamed adapters (vswitch) for LAN and VMNetwork traffic

I would also recommend a separate VLAN or physical switch for iSCSI, you don't want to have LAN and SAN traffic on the same subnet.  Sice the iSCSI traffic doesn't have to route a standalone switch (or two) would be your best best.

Keep in mind that you have to setup Multipathing to your iSCSI SAN for it to use more than a single network connection since the connection is session based you could have 4 connections but only 2 or 4 connections but only one of them would be used unless for failover.  2 port should be enough to start as well as for your LAN traffic.