Adjust the vswitch to optimize the ESXi Network

Adjust the vswitch to optimize the ESXi Network

When optimizing the ESXi network, the administrator should deploy at least two sets of networks to avoid potential network congestion or hardware faults. This tutorial describes how to create and configure vswitches to separate different types of network traffic.

Manual configuration is recommended

When creating an ESXi virtual environment, you should not only rely on the default configuration. The system allows you to create a network that only contains one network card on the ESXi host, but this does not provide you with the best protection and performance.

Two types of networks

Because traditional ESXi infrastructure requires multiple networks, ESXi hosts usually have multiple physical NICs. By default, there are management networks and Virtual Machine networks. 1. The management network contains traffic between daily management and ESXi hosts, such as vMotion (Real-time migration of virtual machines to another host. From the network perspective, real-time migration is a heavy operation; you should reserve enough available bandwidth to ensure that other conventional user traffic will not affect vMotion.

Figure 1. Virtual Machine network and management network are connected to the same physical network card

Potential traffic congestion

The default configuration problem is that the management network and Virtual Machine network are on the same vswitch, that is, connected to the same physical network card. You can logically isolate network traffic, but it is not physically isolated. You should add another physical Nic and another physical switch to separate the network traffic and virtual machine traffic to avoid blocking.

If multiple NICs are installed on the server, you can view these NICs in the vSphere Client. As shown in figure 2, most of them are not allocated to any vswitch, so they cannot be used.

Figure 2. You need to manually modify the default network configuration of ESXi to use all available NICs

Assign Nic to vswitch

To assign a NIC to a vswitch, you need to use the Network Configuration Wizard. Select the network connection type in use. For all background services that can be considered as provided by ESXi, such as storage traffic or vMotion traffic, the VM Kernel type should be selected. The VM network type should be selected for user traffic to access virtual machines. Then, create a new vswitch. When creating a vswitch, select the NIC or the NIC you want to connect. To achieve better fault tolerance, it is best to select at least two NICs. 3. If a network card or line fails, business continuity can be guaranteed.

Figure 3. Connect at least two NICs to minimize the impact of network adapter or line failure

After specifying how to connect to a new network, you can assign a descriptive label to it. By default, it is a universal label like VM Network 2. It is best to specify a label with practical significance, such as an internal server network. If you use a VLAN in a physical network, you can also assign VLAN tags to it.

Allocate virtual machines to different networks

So far, you have created a new network, but have not completed all the operations. You also need to allocate virtual machines to this network. You can perform this operation from the virtual machine network properties. 4. It is very important to change the network allocation of created virtual machines.

Figure 4. After creating a new network, you also need to change the network of the VM.