Forum Discussion
George_Kulman
Jan 31, 2021Copper Contributor
Physical NIC’s, Teaming and Virtual Switches
I have a 2019 Server Datacenter version that’s still in the planning phase. When it finally goes into production it will have 12 low demand VM’s. It has adequate memory and disk space for its planned use. The physical server has 14 - 1 gigabit NIC’s and its internet connectivity is a 900/800 FIOS connection with a CIDR Block of 13 usable IP’s, 12 of which are available for the VM’s. Two of the NIC’s are teamed and dedicated to the core OS. All NIC's support SR-IOV.
My question is about the other 12 NIC’s. My choices seem to be:
- Dedicate 1 NIC to each VM. The big disadvantage with this approach is the lack or redundancy.
- Team NIC’s in the Core, create Virtual Switches and share the Virtual Switch(s) between VM’s. This appears to be the better approach and is the direction I’m heading towards. If I do this, I have questions about the Teams. I could Team all 12 NIC’s and use the resulting one Virtual Switch for all 12 of the VM’s or I could create smaller teams which would be shared with a lesser number of VM’s for each Virtual Switch.
Questions:
- Am I correct that creating teams in the core and sharing the resultant Virtual Switches is the correct approach?
- Is there an optimum number of NIC’s that should be used for a team. I could create teams of 2, 3, 4, 6 or 12 NIC’s and share each team with the same number of VM’s.
- I could also create smaller teams and use multiple Virtual Switches for each VM. For example; Create 3 teams of 4 NIC’s each and assign each tea to a VS and assign all 3 teams to each VM.
Thoughts and recommendations please.
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