Cisco Nexus 1000v VSMs and several VM clusters

[VladimirX]

Hello, Colleagues!

Please give me some advice for the problem that I currently have.

I am trying to deploy Cisco Nexus 1000v in our infrastructure.

Our infrastructure includes 5 ESXi 5.1 hosts in production and 2 hosts in test segments. All the hosts are controlled by 1 vCenter server.

In vSphere configuration there is 1 datacenter which includes 2 clusters, one for production area and another for test area. The hosts are placed in those clusters according their roles.

I successfully finished Nexus 1000v tests in test area. So currently I have 2 VSM virtual machines in the test cluster. VEM modules are installed on test hosts. Cisco Nexus distributed virtual switch created and it's currently working.

So, the next step is to continue deploy in production. But this step seems confused to me because I am not sure about necessity of 2 other VSM machines in production cluster. Do I need to deploy separate VSMs for that purpose? If I do then I suppose that I will have 2 different Nexus DVSs in vCenter environment. Is it possible? I am not sure.

Maybe the better way is to move working test VSMs into production cluster. But in that case the test environment will not work anymore.

Please give me some orientations about correct solution for this problem.

Thanks in advance!

[Keny Perez]

Yes, you can have more than 1 N1kv (pair of VSMs) in the same vCenter.

-Kenny

[Justin Welch]

Hello,

A VEM module can only belong to a single VSM (or 2 if you are using HA mode) at a time. With that in mind you can have multiple DVS per VSM instance. Here are the configuration maximums for the most recent release:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus1000/sw/5_x/release_notes/b_Cisco_NIKV_VMware_521SV315a_ReleaseNotes.html#concept_A99F19C596E94FBD8B4642DB22CB9CF8

The bigger question is what separates your production and test hosts? If it is just a naming standard, etc then your VSM should be able to communicate with all of your VEM modules and there is no real need to move around the VSM. If it is subnets, vlans, etc then it might be best to deploy a VSM pair for your test hosts then another pair for your production hosts. To move VMs between the two you would need to change the VM network.

Hope this helps,

Justin