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Multiple network cards and VMware vSphere
Moderators: anton (staff), art (staff), Max (staff), Anatoly (staff)
I have a Windows 2008 server with 6 network cards. 1 card is used for management and 1 other for replication. How should I configure the other 4 cards? Should I have 4 iSCSI ports or should I do teaming or multipathing? I am connecting it to 3 vSphere servers with 2 nics on each to this StarWind server.
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TomHelp4IT
- Posts: 22
- Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:03 pm
As I remember it the official VMware advice is not to use any form of teaming or link aggregation but instead let the ESX software iSCSI handle the multipathing for you. Therefore you would set up each of the 4 NICs with a separate IP address on the same subnet, and then add each of those IPs to the "Dynamic Discovery" tab on your ESX(i) servers iSCSI storage adaptor settings.
The disadvantage of this is that your ESX(i) to SAN connection is going to be limited to 1Gbps unless you have invested in 10Gbps NICs, but since ESX(i) isnt keen on LACP and such like there's not much you can do about it. To be honest its not usually likely to be an issue unless you have some particularly heavy data throughput requirements, in which case you would probably invest in 10GbE. It does raise another interesting point though - this is a situation where it may be preferable to have multiple SAN targets rather than one big one, as ESX(i) manages its paths per iSCSI target rather than server. Therefore 6 VMs on one target would have to share a single 1GbE path, whereas 3 each on two targets could be sharing a 1GbE path each, assuming the ESXi server has 2 NICs available for iSCSI. You may need to do some manual path balancing on the ESXi servers to get that working though.
The disadvantage of this is that your ESX(i) to SAN connection is going to be limited to 1Gbps unless you have invested in 10Gbps NICs, but since ESX(i) isnt keen on LACP and such like there's not much you can do about it. To be honest its not usually likely to be an issue unless you have some particularly heavy data throughput requirements, in which case you would probably invest in 10GbE. It does raise another interesting point though - this is a situation where it may be preferable to have multiple SAN targets rather than one big one, as ESX(i) manages its paths per iSCSI target rather than server. Therefore 6 VMs on one target would have to share a single 1GbE path, whereas 3 each on two targets could be sharing a 1GbE path each, assuming the ESXi server has 2 NICs available for iSCSI. You may need to do some manual path balancing on the ESXi servers to get that working though.
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Constantin (staff)
Both options are acceptable. I know, that VmWare doesn`t recommend using NIC Teaming, but as far as I know such configurations work properly. Anyway, I would be interested to know about your result configuration.