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3750 Cisco for VMware ESXi 5.5

Hello, I am building a small new VMware cluster with 2x Cisco C220 rack servers and 1 FAS2220 over NFS GbE

When searching for switches I came across the 3750's

Are these reliable for virtualization? I know of course they support VLAN trunking and stacking, i was just wondering if there might be something better in this price range?

Are the 3750's line rate forwarding capable?

We plan to use 6 GbE NIC's per server, one pair for management, one for vMotion/FT and one for storage (NFS).

Thanks!

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Soulja

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sk391

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yes i see the 3850 is mostly marketed as access switch with functions we dont really need. Only 6 ports will be used on each switch.. basically as top of rack switches for 2 small racks.

yes the gigabit version is the one we are looking at..

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Abhilash

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Bradley Fox

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sk391

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Thanks I was looking at the 2960's too... I agree layer3 features are not needed on the VMware switches.

Is there any major advantage when stacking the switches, instead of just connecting them with both hosts? we will be using vSphere 5.5..

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Bradley Fox

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sk391

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yes that's a good point. the storage is a NetApp FAS2220 which has 2x 4 GBe NICs (it has two storage controllers and each controller comes with 4 GbE NICs) for the connection to the hosts, so we can probably do two 2GbE etherchannels (each of the two hosts has 3 NIC pairs, and one pair will be used for the storage traffic)

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Bradley Fox

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gmbaxter

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sk391

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Thanks for the thoughts

I also saw the Nexus 3048 but the list price is almost double that of 2960S, it seems they might only be used in very specific use cases? when connecting to larger networks probably in large deployments.