I have 6 ESX 4.1 servers. Each server has 6 NICs. Current setup is VMNIC0 & VMNIC1 are for Service Console. VMNIC2 is for vMotion and the last three are for VM guest traffic. I have two Cisco 6509 switches. Three of vsphere servers are connected to switch1 and three are connected to switch2. I have a couple of questions.
1. Does anyone think I should split three NICs for VM across the two physical switches? We don't have redundancy in many parts of the network so I don't think I need to this and maybe the teaming will work even better if they are all on the same physical switch?
2. If I don't set a Service Console NIC to standby - it tells me I don't have network redundancy on the service console. Isn't there a way to use both as active and get the server to recognize the redundnant NICs?
3. I don't have distributed virtual switches in my licensing so I can't use them. When I created my virtual switch I did not configure anything on the NIC teaming tab. If the NICs are all part of the same vswitch do I need to configure NIC teaming? I thought adding them to the vswitch teamed them by default.
4. If I'm wrong and NICs on the same vswitch are not teamed by default, my physical switch is configured for trunk ports using dot1q, I want all NICs to be used (no standby) to the best it can be without setting up LACP or some aggregation - what are my best options to choose on the NIC teaming tab?
Thanks.