Virtual Machine Host Blade NIC Setup

[BobLfoot 302]

I'm setting up a new Blade Server which will host five production Virtual Machines.  This blade has eight 1 gigabit physical NICS available.

I had originally planned 1 physical NIC per VM, but then I read I can NIC Team between the Blade and Cisco Switch Uplink. 

NIC Teaming would give the possibility a VM could use more than a 1 Gig data flow if needed and if in the rare instance of a cabling failure the remaining NICs would share the load.

This would seem like the best approach, but I'm asking if anyone has done this sort of thing with host blades?

For Reference VM1, VM2 and VM3 are all part of an Aveva HMI Galaxy so would probably share three NICS as a team setup.

VM4 is a Data Collector so I would give it two NICS.

VM5 is the Development and maintenance PC so I'd give it two NICS.

This would leave a spare NIC unused.

Am I totally crazy??

[pturmel 160]

I so hate proprietary names for common functionality.  Depending on whether VLANs are involved, "NIC Teaming" would be either "bridging" and/or "trunking" and/or "bonding" in ordinary managed switch terms.

FWIW, it is common for hypervisor hardware to have either a single trunk to an upstream switch, or redundant (like Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol) trunks, while all virtual NICs in the guest VMs are bridged in the hypervisor to the appropriate VLANs (if any, in the trunks).

You aren't crazy at all, except for being stuck with "walled garden" hypervisor vendor.

[BobLfoot 302]

On 4/10/2023 at 5:19 PM, pturmel said:

except for being stuck with "walled garden" hypervisor vendor.

@pturmel Wasn't my choice , but the Almighty IT Gods have decreed we use Dell Servers and VMWare ESXI for virtual management.

"When the plan comes together, I love it.  When it doesn't, Oh well that's life."