I have a question about the number of ports needed on a standard vSwitch. I have a cluster of 6 hosts; each host has 2 10G NICs (each host is ESXi 5.1 - not U1). On each host I have a standard vswitch defined for use only by the VMs (i.e., the management network and the vMotion network each has their own separate NICs, an active and a standby, and standard vswitches). The cluster has 128 VMs and templates in total. Each of these vswitches is defined with the default of 120 ports. This should be enough, correct? Unless I do something completely idiotic, like trying to run all the VMs on only 1 host, I should have enough ports available. Right now, I am averaging about 20-25 VMs on a host at any one time. All the VMs have only 1 NIC installed. So each individual switch should only have 20-25 ports in use at any one time.
Is that correct?
If I do decide to increase the number of ports, I would just need to change the configuration and choose a higher value (say 248), and then migrate off all the VMs, put the host in maintenance mode, and reboot the host, in order for the changes to take effect.
I'm having a weird problem where sometimes a VM will lose communication with another VM. Not all VMs, but with certain ones. Pings just time out. Migrating to another host does not solve the problem. Rebooting the target VM can restore it. Sometimes doing absolutely nothing resolves the problem. :-)
Windows logs show nothing (these are all Windows VMs), VMware logs show nothing (according to VMware Tech Support).I don't think my problem is switch port related, but I thought I would ask.
Me, I wonder about the Cisco switch all the hosts connect to, so this weekend we will be upgrading the firmware on it (it's overdue).
Anyway, I thought I would ask. I may increase the number of ports at my next patching cycle anyway, because I don't think it will hurt anything. It just may not (probably will not) help anything.