I have recently taken over management of 2 vmware hosts and 1 SAN... Based on my readings of vmware best practices, this is set up the exact opposite of how it should be, ha. I am going to try and be as thorough as possible, and I am really just looking for a little guidance to point me in the right direction to get this set up configured properly.
Physical Hardware is set up what looks to be correct(mostly)
we have 2 hosts, each has 4 built in NIC ports, and also have a NIC card that has 4 ports. all gigabit.
I have two 24 port Cisco switches configured Master / Secondary (for failover)
I have a VNXe 3150 storage array with 2 storage processors, each storage processor has a total of 6 gigabit NIC ports.
Ports going from the VNXe to the Cisco switches are bonded, I have 2 ports on each SP bonded crossing over to opposing Cisco switches. And then I have 4 ports bonded crossing over to opposing Cisco switches as well.
My two hosts are set up identically.
4 ports are not bonded and each is attached to their own vSwitch and are iSCSI connectors
vSwitch1 – iSCSI1 – vmk2 – vmnic2
vSwitch2 – iSCSI2 – vmk1 – vmnic3
vSwitch3 – iSCSI3 – vmk3 – vmnic6
vSwitch4 – iSCSI4 – vmk4 – vmnic7
Those are the iSCSI connections, the remaining 4 ports are configured as
vSwitch0
vmk0
Management network(no vlan) – Active Adapters = vmnic0 – vmnic1 – vmnic4 – vmnic5
VM Network(no vlan) – Active Adapters = vmnic0 / Standby Adapters = vmnic1 – vmnic4 – vmnic5
Load balancing is based on originating virtual port
Physical adapters vmnic0 – vmnic1 – vmnic4 – vmnic5
So correct me if I'm wrong, with this current set up, all VM Network traffic is being routed out over 1 NIC, and the other 3 are sitting idle?
Based on the settings above which I think to be way wrong, what would be the best solution to getting this set up better, and more along the lines of vmware best practices?
I’ve read that Management traffic should be on its own vlan, should it also be on its own physical nic port? I can’t get to crazy as this is in a production network, luckily I can move over all vm’s to the second host to reconfigure things and have 0 down time.
Any thoughts are super appreciative.
Thank you
George