HP ProLiant BL660c HP BladeSystem Networking Reference Architecture: HP Virtua - Page 9

function, and if FT is a design requirement, then the overall impact of its inclusion should be examined. With the design example given, there are three options one could choose to incorporate FT Logging: Table 2-2 VMware Fault Tolerance Options FT Design Choice Justification Share with VMotion network The design choice to keep VMotion traffic internally to the Domain allows the use of low latency links for inter-Domain communication. NetIOC could be used to control and provide VMotion or FT traffic higher shares, or priority, over the other traffic. Non-redundant VMotion Dedicate one pNIC for VMotion traffic, and the other for FT and FT networks logging traffic. Neither network will provide pNIC redundancy. Add additional FlexFabric Adapters and Modules This option increases the overall CapEx to the solution, but will provide more bandwidth options. Rating *** ** * Network I/O Control Network I/O Control8 (NetIOC), is a feature of the vDS that provides QoS-like capabilities. NetIOC can identify the following types of traffic:  Virtual Machine  FT Logging  iSCSI (Software Initiator only; HW iSCSI Offload not supported)  NFS  Service Console Management  vMotion NetIOC can be used to control identified traffic, when multiple types of traffic are sharing the same pNIC. In our design example above, FT Logging could share the same vDS as the vmkernel, and NetIOC would be used to control the two types of traffic. NetIOC can also be used to apply an 802.1p tag for DataCenter QOS, which is not supported by Virtual Connect at this time. Hypervisor Load Balancing Algorithms VMware provides a number of different NIC teaming algorithms, which are outlined in Table 2-3. As the table shows, any of the available algorithms can be used, except IP Hash. IP Hash requires switch assisted load balancing (802.3ad), which Virtual Connect does not support 802.3ad with server downlink ports. HP and VMware recommend using Originating Virtual Port ID with Standard vSwitch, and Physical NIC Load when using vDS and NetIOC, as shown in Table 2-3. 8 http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW_Netioc_BestPractices.pdf (vSphere 4.1) or Managing Network Resources chapter in http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-501-networking-guide.pdf 9