Thanks, I wasn't sure whether the "overhead on NIOC" as you mentioned outweighed the benefits of having the flexibility compared to using FlexNICs.
So I have the following:
- a bunch of VLANs for data (no real priotity of one VLAN over another)
- management requirement
- vMotion requirement
There's no iSCSI or NFS storage - all datastores are SAN based, so that's one less thing to worry about.
Currently, we have two pairs of FlexNICs: one for all data traffic (allocated 8Gb in VC), and the other for all mangement and vMotion (using the remaining 2Gb of the pNIC in VC).
Management and vMotion are on the same VLAN (but different IP addresses).
A few questions then:
- I understand you recommend keeping management / vMotion in a separate pair of flexNICs so as not to give additional overhead managing within VMware.
- Is there a benefit of splitting management and vMotion in different VLANs but keeping them in the same uplink (so tagging the VLANs)
- Would we be better off using two different pairs of FlexNICs, one for management and one for vMotion thereby using 3 pairs of FlexNICs in total (1 for all data VLANs, one non-tagged for management and a third non-tagged for vMotion). If so, I guess you'd give different bandwidths within VC to keep vMotion nice and fast?
Another possible issue we have at the moment I haven't been able to pinpoint: when going to open a console of a VM within the vSphere client, it takes a long time before the desktop appears (around 20-30 seconds). Not sure whether this is a contention issue on the management? vMotion still appears quite quick.
Finally, just to confirm we need to have vmotion going outside the VC domain: we have several c7000 chassis with ESXi hosts and they're not linked together in a single VC domain. So all that "internal" traffic is declared on the Avaya switches in order to propogate to hosts in another chassis