Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
When determining the correct storage solution, you must consider the following questions:
What type of storage will best integrate with your existing storage or net work
infrastructure?
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Do you have experience or expertise with some types of storage?
Can the storage solution provide the necessary performance to support your environment?
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Does the storage solution offer any form of advanced integration with vSphere?
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The procedures involved in creating and managing storage devices are discussed in detail in
Chapter 6.
Integrating with the Network Infrastructure
The third and i nal major decision that you need to make during the planning process is how
your vSphere deployment will integrate with the existing network infrastructure. In part, this
decision is driven by the choice of server hardware and the storage protocol.
For example, an organization selecting a blade form factor may run into limitations on
the number of network interface cards (NICs) that can be supported in a given blade model.
This affects how the vSphere implementation will integrate with the network. Similarly,
organizations choosing to use iSCSI or NFS instead of Fibre Channel will typically have to
deploy more NICs in their ESXi hosts to accommodate the additional network trafi c or use 10
Gigabit Ethernet. Organizations also need to account for network interfaces for vMotion and
vSphere FT.
Until 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) became common, ESXi hosts in many vSphere deploy-
ments had a minimum of 6 NICs and often 8, 10, or even 12 NICs. So, how do you decide how
many NICs to use? We'll discuss some of this in greater detail in Chapter 5, “Creating and
Coni guring Virtual Networks,” but here are some general guidelines:
The ESXi management network needs at least one NIC. We strongly recommend adding
a second NIC for redundancy. In fact, some features of vSphere, such as vSphere HA, will
note warnings if the hosts do not have redundant network connections for the manage-
ment network.
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vMotion needs a NIC. Again, we heartily recommend a second NIC for redundancy. These
NICs should be at least Gigabit Ethernet. In some cases, this trafi c can be safely combined
with ESXi management trafi c, so we'll assume that t wo NICs will handle both ESXi man-
agement and vMotion.
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vSphere FT, if you will be utilizing that feature, needs a NIC. A second NIC would provide
redundancy and is recommended. This should be at least a Gigabit Ethernet NIC, prefer-
ably a 10 Gigabit Ethernet NIC.
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For deployments using iSCSI or NFS, at least one more NIC, preferably two, is needed.
Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet is necessary here. Although you can get by with a
single NIC, we strongly recommend at least t wo.
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Finally, at least two NICs are needed for trafi c originating from the VMs themselves.
Gigabit Ethernet or faster is strongly recommended for VM trafi c.
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