Blog by PQR

First challenge is:

How can I implement the customers demands in the hypervisor platform?

The Demands are:

• Hardware redundancy for all network traffice from VM to physical switch
  
• vLAN tagging
  
• Seperate LAN traffic for all different traffic streams (IP Based Storage, LAN Traffic, Management Traffic

The goal off the challenge is to show how to configure a part off an virtual infrastructure cross the following platforms, Xenserver, vSphere 4 and Hyper-V 2008 R2. Even if it is not possible we will try to configure the best result we can get.

So this is not a competition but a demonstration off possibilities (or not...).

How do they do it in vSphere 4?

After a default ESX4 host installation i removed the VM Network portgroup,

First i add all network interfaces that are available.

The result is a vswitch called vSwitch0, it has 4 network interfaces. I patched vmnic0 and vmnic2 on physical switch 1 and vmnic1 and vmnic3 on physical switch 2.

My result now is a hardware redundancy for all traffic in just a few clicks!

Next i will configure several vLan tagged portgroups.

just 3 clicks for every portgroup, i wil configure 5 but could easy do 50.

Next i wil configure a Portgroup for vMotion.

3 clicks and there it is!

And the result.

Next i will seperate management and LAN traffic. to accomplise this i wil override the vSwitch failover order.

First Service Console.

vMotion

LAN Traffic (All vLan tags can use all patchports on the physical switch side)

I could switch vmnic1 and vmnic3 when configured 50% of LAN portgroups.

Done! for the next step IP Storage i have two options. Add another Portgroup to  vSwitch0 or build another vSwitch. I Preffer to add another vSwitch to the network configuration, often companies who use IP storage have a seperate physical switch infrastructure for this purpose.

This is the end result, it covers all customers demands! let's find out how easy this is in Xenserver and Hyper-V 2008 R2.