Dell VxRail Network Planning Guide

IP address considerations for VxRail networks

Assign IP addresses to the VxRail external management network, the VMware vMotion network, and any guest networks. If your cluster is going to use VMware vSAN as primary storage, IP addresses are required for the vSAN network. You can segment the external management network to separate subnets for the physical and logical components. Determine the IP address ranges reserved for each VxRail network.

• The internal management network that is used for device discovery does not require assigned IP addresses.
• Since the external management network must be able to route upstream to network services and end users, a non-private, routable IP address range must be assigned to this network.
• By default, the external management network and VMware vCenter Server management network share the same non-private, routable IP address range. The VMware vCenter Server management network provides connectivity to VxRail Manager and the embedded VMware vCenter Server instance. Starting with 7.0.350, if you do not want VxRail Manager and the VMware vCenter Server instance to share the same subnet with the VxRail (ESXi) nodes, assign a separate non-private, routable subnet to this network.
• The options for VxRail cluster primary storage require either Ethernet for vSAN, or another supported storage option for dynamic clusters. If your cluster will not be deployed with a vSAN datastore, VxRail does not require a vSAN network, and this task can be skipped.
  • With a vSAN network, you can reserve a routable or non-routable (private) IP address range.
  • If your plans include a multi-rack cluster, and you want to use a new IP subnet range in the expansion racks, reserve a routable IP address range.
  • If you plan to configure the cluster into a vSAN HCI mesh topology to share vSAN storage resources, reserve a routable IP address range.
  • If you are planning a VxRail cluster only with a local vSAN datastore, a non-routable IP address range is acceptable. In this case, traffic is passed only between the VxRail nodes that form the cluster.
  • If you plan to configure a dynamic cluster to use external FC-based storage as primary storage, there is no need to reserve an IP address range.
• If your requirements for virtual machine mobility are within the VxRail cluster, a non-routable IP address range can be assigned to the vMotion network. However, if you need to enable virtual machine mobility outside of the VxRail cluster, or have plans for a multi-rack expansion that will use a different subnet range on any expansion racks, reserve a routable IP address range.