Administrator Guide

12 Dell FS8600 with VMware vSphere  Deployment and Configuration Best practices
4.2 Switch Topology
The switch infrastructure that connects to the FS8600 should be redundant (See example on Figure 2) in order to support
and maintain . Architecturally, three guiding principles should be used to construct a best
practice switch connectivity topology:
• 
• 
• 
ESX Host
ST
Gb 1 Gb 2 Gb 3 Gb 4
1
2
1
2
43
5
6
2 864
1 753
10 161412
9 151311
18 242220
17 232119 ACTLN K
LnkAct
Port0 1
LnkAct
GRN=10G
ACT/LNK A
GRN=10G
ACT/LNK B
GRN=10G
ACT/LNK A
GRN=10G
ACT/LNK B
GRN=10G
ACT/LNK A
GRN=10G
ACT/LNK B
GRN=10G
ACT/LNK A
GRN=10G
ACT/LNK B
2 864
1 753
10 161412
9 151311
18 242220
17 232119 ACTLN K
FS8610i
ST
Gb 1 Gb 2 Gb 3 Gb 4
1
2
1
2
43
5
6
LnkAct
Port0 1
LnkAct
Trunk
ESX Host
Figure 2 Sample ESX Host to FS8600 Interconnect Network Switch Topology
4.3 ESX Host NICs for Datastore Traffic
Dell recommends assigning at least one pair of VMNICs (both of the same line speed) on every ESX host to exclusively
transport NFS datastore traffic between the host and the FS8600. These links will provide the network infrastructure
required for the creation, deletion and cloning of virtual machines, as well as their I/O workload on their virtual hard
drives. Determining the VMNIC throughput required for this type of workload should take into consideration the
environment and throughput requirements of the virtual machines in use. The VMNICs should be teamed to provide both
fault tolerance as well as increased aggregated throughput by applying ESX host load sharing methods (See NFS
Datastore Traffic Load Sharing on Page 14).