Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Number of Physical Network Adapters
A number of factors influence the number of physical network adapters required,
including vSphere License level, bandwidth requirements, latency and response time
requirements, whether database replication or AlwaysOn Availability Groups are used,
security policy for traffic separation, and storage networking requirements. The sizing
of your databases and hosts in terms of memory can also impact network adapter choice
due to vMotion requirements. It is important to balance these different requirements and
come up with a design that best meets your objectives. Our recommendation is to use as
few network adapters as necessary, to keep the design simple, and to use 10Gb Ethernet
if possible.
One of the biggest influences of network adapter selection is the requirement to separate
different types of traffic, such as management, vMotion, virtual machine, and storage
traffic. Before 10Gb Ethernet was widely available and cost effective, it was common
to see vSphere hosts configured with six or eight or more 1Gb Ethernet NICs. There
might be two for management, two for vMotion, and potentially two or four NICs for
virtual machine traffic, or two for VM traffic and two for storage traffic. This could
have been due to needing to support physical network separation to different switches
and where using VLAN trunk ports was not possible. This was also common where only
vSphere standard switches were in use and it was not possible to provide quality of
service or intelligent load balancing across the NIC ports.
Figure 8.16
shows an
example of a common 1Gb Ethernet virtual networking configuration with vSphere
standard switches.
