Keeping the vMotion Tiger in the 10GB Cage - Update

There has been a lot of activity regarding my post from last Sunday.  Again, all credit goes out to Don Mann and the ePlus Engineering Team (Rob Quast in particular) for all their hard work surrounding Don's presentation at VMworld.  The title of the session was 10GB and FCoE Design Considerations and it was great!  If you get a chance to catch it on the VMworld replay, I highly suggest it.

I wrote the first post because even though vSphere 4.1 has been out for a few months, it is Don's session that set off the light bulb in my head that made me start asking questions.  I wanted to know from VMware if it was true that vMotion (and really any traffic that isn't controlled) can saturate a 10GB link with vSphere 4.1.  Is this a new design criteria that I now MUST consider?  I asked on the forums and it was confirmed by none other than Dilpreet himself.  Thank you again Dilpreet for taking the time to post!

In the meantime, Sean McGee and Brad Hedlund also wrote articles to further explain the concepts as well as lay out some architecture solutions.  Sean's post is here and Brad's post is here.  Please take the time to read them both, great stuff!

Due to some other things going on, I won't be posting the follow ups that I promised in Part One.  I'm very sorry about that and I hope to get to them someday but the circumstances right now just won't allow that to happen.  Besides, Sean and Brad did a great job (probably better!) than I could have.