Design Consideration- 6 Nics and using IP Storage

[cts_jay]

The 1000v Deployment guide has a design suggestion at the end for ESX hosts with 6 physical Nics.  The suggestion is to create two vPC-HM port channels; one with two physical NICs assigned to it dedicated for VMware VMotion as well as the service console and control and packet VLANs.  The other port channel uses the remaining port four physical NICsand is dedicated to VM guest data traffic.

What is the recommended configuration if you are using an IP based storage (e.g. NFS, iSCSI)?  Should the storage be put on the 4 NIC port channel?  or should we instead create three port channels with two physical NICs each and dedicate one of the port channels to IP Storage?

cheers,

Andy

[lwatta]

My opinion is to break it out if this is a production environment. iSCSI and NFS can be very chatty and you don't want VM data traffic to slow down I/O and you don't want I/O traffic to prevent vMotion from working.

I'd go with 3 port-channels as you describe.

Keep an eye out for some new vPC modes that we are working on. The new modes might have enough features that you won't mind combining some of these port-channels.

louis