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I just purchased an HP Virtualization bundle and am trying to figure out how to get the vsphere networking properly configured. I've read a ton of documents on the web etc. and VMWare's site etc. but I need some help with this.

Here's what I have hardware/software wise:

2 x HP DL180 servers with two onboard gigabit NICS and one quad-port gigabit NIC. 1 X HP 2510G 24 port switch

1 X Vsphere ESX Essentials Plus license

1 X Hp Lefthand Networks VSA license

I managed to get the HP servers up and running with ESX installed and operational. I also conffigured the VSA according to some materials I found on the web and that works great too.

My problem is that I really don't know what i'm doing in terms of the virtual networking config in VSphere. I configured everything so it's using my production LAN IP's just so I could see how it works and play with it. I plan to reload everything and start from scratch once I understand what i'm doing with the nics/switches and virtual networking etc.

Your guidance and help is greatly appreciated.

thanks,

-- SL

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3 Answers

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This depends a lot on what your goals are... Do you need to have different VLANs for your VMs? How about redundancy. Are all 6 NIC ports going to be hooked to the same switch? What happens if that switch dies? A good suggestion is to split the NIC ports between at least two switches.

Concerning the setup of the vSwitch, you can put 1 or more NICs on a vSwitch and then that switch can be used as the attachment for your VMs. This will give you multiple paths out of your ESX box for each VM. It can both increase your bandwidth (depending on the HP2510G capabilities) and your redundancy.

You also can just assign one physical NIC to each VM, but then you would be limited to 4 VMs in your current config as you want to have 2 NICs dedicated to the console. 2 NICs are not required, but if the link is dead on the console's NIC(s), then ESX will not boot. Learned that one the hard way at 4AM.
Here are some good articles on VMWare's site:

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thanks for the links by the way but vDS is only available with an Enterprise license and I don't have that. – SLAING Mar 5 '10 at 20:29
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No, I don't need to have different VLANs for the VM's. We're a small environment here, our production LAN is running off a single Cisco 48 port gigabit switch. this is a big change from where I worked previously, but here if the network goes down - we go home :) Anyway, I would of course like to have it operate as issue free as possible - but I'll have to work with what i've got. As there are six nics in total, I was thinking that this nic config would work well, what are your thoughts? : Two nics for service mgmt console Two nics on seperate vswitch for VM's Two nics for VSAN (should I create a seperate vswitch for that too?) Just not sure how I should set it up and how to get there?!

thanks,

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If the VSANs are Fibre Channel based, then they are configured in the Storage configuration, not the network configuration. I believe iSCSI SANs are also configured in storage, but I don't have an iSCSI device to confirm that. Other than that, your suggested configuration should work fine. Just so you are aware, you may run into some problems if your hardware switch can't do a good job of trunking. Also make sure you configure the vSwitch to use IP hashing as its means of determining which NIC to use when sending packets. – Scott Lundberg Mar 5 '10 at 20:52
Thanks Scott. The VSANS are iSCSI based. I did configure them in the storage config section. I've configured two additional vswitches in addition to the the original default vswitch. the original vswitch has the service console on it, the 2nd swithc has the iSCSI and the 3rd has the VM's. Can I use the single HP switch for all of this? what are your suggestions here - I feel like i'm bumbling around in the dark. Thanks, – SLAING Mar 5 '10 at 21:06
No problem... That should work, but make sure that you, at a minimum, separate your SAN and IP networks with a VLAN. You can do this through the vSwitch and then set the corresponding VLAN on your hardware switch... Are you using the HP for the SAN network and the Cisco for your LAN network? – Scott Lundberg Mar 5 '10 at 22:59
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Yes, HP switch is for SAn network and Cisco is production LAN. I've read a bit about enabling jumbo frames, should I do this as well? thanks.

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Jumbo frames definitely useful when it comes to vmotion and speed it takes to transfer large files. So if possible, you should enable this both on the switches and the configs on esxi. – Cold T Dec 12 '11 at 17:42
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