ESX / Hyper-V Network Diagram

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Hi Guys,
Whilst I'm waiting for the rest of my kit to arrive I've been putting together some network diagrams to help me me visualise it all. Reading a few articles on techhead it sounds like I'm going to have fewer problems installing VMWARE ESX 4.0 than the older version (mainly the onboard SATA controller).

At some point I'll also want to give Hyper-V a try so this will be used for both setups.

 

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Can we have a bit better quality? I am very interested in seeing what's actually on your diagram

 

It's now hyperlinked to a larger version.

 

Looks good John, but im not quite sure why you are risking your data storage (especially VMs) on Raid 0?

I would have thought for performance, a good PCI-E controller and Raid 10 would have been better?

Andy

 

It looks simple and has room for expansion, well done and keep us posted. To madman it's a lab for training purposes so no risk of data loss or compromise

 

John - the switch you're using - I presume it has vlan capability?

Even if it does, personally I'd go with a decent brand switch - even if its a cheap procurve - because I've found performance on linksys/netgear etc switches absolutely dreadful when running iSCSI through them. I run my home lab through an 1800-24G - the cheapest HP Gb switch I could find. Cost me £125 from eBay brand new and is worth its weight in gold. figuring out vlans on it is a bit tricky (it only has a WebUI, not a CLI) but once you've got it sorted its rock solid and at least twice as fast vmotioning than the crappy Dell powerConnect I had in there before. Just a thought!

 

Madman my main concerns were performance and capacity which is why I opted for a RAID0 configuration. Whilst a drive failure would be an annoyance it wouldn't be the end of the world in a training lab environment.

Zeb, the switch I'm looking to purchase is a Linksys SLM2008 which does have VLAN capabilities for seperating the storage traffic. I'm not sold on it but it seems to do what I wanted. I'll certainly look into the HP kit you mentioned. At the moment almost everything I've bought for the lab is HP, lol

 

OK, I'm jealous!

Let's see the lab mate when you have all your OS's installed

 

Will do Craig - just waiting for my network cards, the additional hard drives and a new switch. Once I have these I'll be getting my hands dirty.

Zeb, looked around I can only find the 1800 24G for around £250. Which takes me over budget. I do have the additional cash spare but I'm getting a little buyers remorse looking at all the empty boxes, lol

I did find the 1800 8G for £103. I'm only going to need 7-8 ports so this seems like the route to go..

 

Tru dat. You can get away with it with only two hosts plus the SAN. I've got three, so needed the extra portage! When I got everything for my lab it all turned up in the space of two days. The cardboard I had in my basement was a fire hazard!

 

Worst case, when you expand
you can buy a second 1800-8G, dedicate one to SAN and one to LAN
nice set up mate

 

I think that even with your concerns about capacity 4TB is a little overkill just for a training lab.
Have you thought about including just 3 of your disks in the raid config and using the 4th for vm backups? After you install and set up a new vm you can take a copy of it and put it on the 4th disk so if anything goes wrong you just copy the vm back into the new datastore.

It looks really nice and now I've joined the jealousy club.