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vStart 1000v for Enterprise Virtualization using VMware vSphere: Reference Architecture
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takes advantage of NPAR. Partitions are created for various traffic types and bandwidth is allocated, as
described in the following section.
7 Network Architecture
LAN traffic in the vStart 1000v solution is categorized into four traffic types: VM traffic, management
traffic, vMotion traffic, and Out-of-Band (OOB) management traffic. VM traffic, management traffic,
and vMotion traffic are associated with the blade servers. OOB management traffic is associated with
CMC, iDRAC, Brocade management, and Compellent management traffic. This section provides the
network best practices for implementing VMware vSphere 5 on Dell blade servers and Force10 S4810
switches.
On the PowerEdge M620 blade servers, each of the 10GbE ports is partitioned into four network
interfaces using NPAR resulting in a total of eight NICs for each server. A virtual switch is created for
the three traffic types: VM traffic, management traffic, and vMotion traffic. Two partitions, one from
each physical network port, are connected as uplinks to the virtual switch. This creates a team of two
network ports, enabling NIC failover and load balancing for each vSwitch. The resultant design and
concept is illustrated in Figure 4.