best practice for vswitches in VMWARE

It's Best Practice and Recommended to ISOLATE ALL traffic e.g.

Management
vMotion
Virtual Machines
Storage (iSCSI and NFS).

So that's a vSwitch per each, in an ideal world, with at least two physical nic uplinks per vSwitch.

If you are short on physical nics, VLANs can help, and if you have 10GBe nics, then two 10GBe nics per vSwitch and use of VLANs

ok I see,
Which one is your vmotion network ?

vMotion can only operate on a VMKernel......

so the one labelled VMKernel, vMotion is a TCP/IP network function, so it MUST have an IP Address to be able to communicate with other ESXi hosts.

ok I see,
on my end my vm network and the management is on one vswitch.
How to seperate it ? I cannot delete the management network on it.

How many physical nics, do you have to spare?

create a new virtual switch, with a virtual machine network.

I have 12 nics for all and 2 10G nics for my storage

The uplinks must be trunks right ?
The management and Data links ?

I have no vlans.

ok this is a good plan.
when you say 4x NICS for Virtual Machines in a trunk, do I have then 4x 1Gbps , so 4Gbps ?
And the trunk I have to create on the physical switch right ?
I have ESXi 5.5, can I use LACP with it ?

Now I have setup a new vswitch for vmotion but it is not working.
Maybe the HP switch port settings are wrong ?

make sure, that each server, can ping each other's vMotion interface IP Address.

ok let me check this later

Ok now I decided to put the vmotion network also on the 10G nics together with the Storage vswitch.

Hi Andrew,

regarding this solution from you:
2 x NICs - Management (trunk)
2 x NICs - vMotion
4 x NICs - Virtual Machines (trunk)

How to setup the nics as trunks ?
In vcenter I add the nics and put them all to active.
But on the HP side what do I have to configure ? Which trunks ? LACP ?

ok now I have configured the redundant nics for Management and VM´s.
But on the HP switch it is yet not configured.
I made a test and disconnected vmnic0 and I was able to connect to the host.
So this works also without having trunks.

Can you show me how to configure the trunks on the HP side ?

now my setup is like this:
See the picture.


Is it ok to put the vmotion network on the 10G storage network, because it is faster ?

On this host, see the picture before,I still have a warning that no redundancy is given on the management network. But when you see the picture before I have added 2 nics, vmnic 0 and 4.
What else can be the problem here ?

I have a HP Procurve 4208vl J8773a

I have both, do have also the solution for the GUI ?

...and why I cannot use LACP, because my switch can use it.

Great article and the configuration works fine.
Just two small things left.

One vmnic of a trunk just has 100Mbit FULL DUPLEX, all other have 1000Mbit FULL DUPLEX.
See the picture:


From where it comes ?
On the HP switch I cannot change it because of the trunk or ?

...and when I check my network adapters I see different networks observed.
See the picture:


What does it mean, is it important ?
Why it sees different networks ?

It appears there must be a speed mismatch on the physical network port.

try reconnecting, or changing the cable.

ok, and what about the different observed networks ?
From where it comes ?

ok this will work great with the trunks and vswitches.