vvVirtual networking always takes a significant role in any VMware vSphere design, and even more so if you are leveraging IP-based storage like NAS or iSCSI. If using VMware’s vSAN product, I think it “turns the dial to 11” as the internode communication becomes that much more important versus host-to-target communication. A few months back (based on the date of this post), VMware released an updated vSAN Network Design document that I strongly encourage everyone to read if looking to, or are already running vSAN. For this post however, I am going to dive into what I have used in the field for customer deployments around NIC teaming and redundancy, as well as Network IO Control (NIOC) on the vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS).
Example Scenario
To start, let’s put together a sample scenario to create context around the “how” and “why”. As suggested in the vSAN Network Design document, all the customer designs I have been involved with have incorporated a single pair of ten gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) interfaces for the host-uplink connectivity to a Top of Rack (ToR) or core switch, using either TwinAX or 10GBaseT for the physical layer. This is accomplished using a pair of dual-port Intel X520- or X540-based cards, and allows for future growth if network needs arise down the road. The uplink ports are configured as Trunk ports (if using Cisco) or Tagged ports (if using Brocade/Dell/HP/etc) and the required VLANs for the environment are passed down to the hosts. On the virtual side, a single vDS is 必利勁
created, and each of the hosts in the vSAN cluster are added to the vDS. The required/needed port groups are created and configured with the relevant VLAN id, NIC Teaming and Failover policy (more to come later here). The following figure provides a visual representation: