Hello,
I am in the process of preparing our migration to Hyper-V 2012. At the moment I am a little bit stuck on my desision with network layout to chosse.
Our future datacenter enviroment will have 2 Hyper-v clusters (1 five node for production and management systems and a 1 two node cluster for DMZ) and it will host about 150 VMs.
There will be no dynamic in the physical infrastructure. The systems are planned to have the capacity needed over the next 3 to 4 years.
Converged Fabric
I have done some experiments with the converged fabric aproach (without havig VMM managing the fabric) and ran into several small issues.
I have had dublicate MAC addresses because some hosts had the same local MAC pool. And the vNICs for the Hosts got served by the local MAC pool.
The VMM dhcp switch extension has to be installed and activated before joining them to the cluster and managing them with VMM.
All this could be avoided by using VMM to manage the fabric or by manually managing local MAC etc.
Having VMM manage the fabric would require VMM to run outside the cluster on a seperate server and some effort in the initial setup of VMM.
Tradional Setup
This is straight forward, having 3 teams (Host Management, CSV and Live Migration) for the host and one team for VM traffic. Without all the initial overhead to setup fabric management by VMM or doing everything by hand.
VMM could run inside the cluster and manage only the virtual enviroment, like we have VMM 2008R2 doing it now.
Since we are a small IT department with 4 admins and one CIO and have 500 workstations, 200 physical and virtual servers and 600 users to manage I am a little bit afraid that the "converged fabric" aproach would add an additional layer of complexity
in the setup and afterwards in the diagnosis of problems that may occur without giving us a real benefit.
I would appreciate any input on this topic.
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