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VxRail supports either a single virtual distributed switch (vDS) or two virtual distributed switches as part of the initial bring-up process. This post details how to configure a VxRail cluster using the UI on Day-1 to support two vDS for VxRail system traffic. Also detailed is the configuring of specific load balancing policies at a per port group level for each required VxRail network, a feature that was introduced in VxRail release 7.0.240. VxRail system traffic includes the Discovery, management, vSAN, vCenter Server, and vMotion networks. In this example the VxRail system traffic is sperated across both vDS using a VxRail managed vCenter Server as follows:

• vDS 1 – Network traffic type (Management, Discovery and Tenant)
• vDS 2 – Network traffic type (vSAN, vCenter Server and vMotion)

Opening an ESXi shell on the VxRail nodes and listing the NICs present and connected:

esxcli network nic list

Four 10GbE ports are connected across 2xNDC & 2xPCIe adapters, this can provide NIC-level redundancy between NDC and PCIe adapters (Each vDS will include a port for each adapter).

Standard 3 node deployment:

VxRail managed vCenter Server selected:

Choosing Custom option displays the additional options to customize the network:

•  Choose Number of VDS: 2
•  Choose Host NICs: 2 NICs for each VDS

Note: All vDS NIC options available for a VxRail deployment are shown in drop down below for the ‘VDS Port Profile’. Network profiles using six ports and eight ports for VxRail networking are supported with VxRail 7.0.400 and later.

Defining System traffic separation at the VDS level:

Next configure the 2 vDS as follows:

• Set VDS MTU accordingly (Range: 1500 ~ 9000).
• NIC Configuration: Customize which physical NIC to assign to which uplink.
• VDS portgroup Teaming and Failover: Input active uplink and Active/Standby uplink for each VxRail system traffic.
• Choose Teaming policy for each System Portgroup and load-balancing policies.
• Define MTU value for each vmk according to portgroup.

Note: VxRail Default load-balancing policy:

• active/standby = Route based on the originating virtual port
• active/active = Route based on physical NIC load

View from vSphere VCSA post bring-up:

Note: The vCenter management network port group hosts the VxRail Manager and the vCenter server instance. From VxRail 7.0.350 and onwards the vCenter Server network and VxRail management network (ESXi hosts) can be on separate subnets and VLANs (Future Blog Post).

Thanks for reading!