VMworld #SPO3040 – Best Practises Using 10GbE (for vSphere 5.0)

I attended Intel’s #SPO3040 earlier this afternoon – Best Practises for Deploying VMware vSphere 5.0 Using 10GbE.  It was an interesting session with lots of good material.  Here are 3 short little titbits that I tweeted about that I thought might useful to record here:

• Intel said we will start to see 10GBASE-T on server boards very soon. This allows WoL (Wake-on-LAN) and OOB (Out-of_Band) type services, unlike SFP+ DA or SPF+ Fiber (although as @AlexanderJN pointed out, 10GBASE-T is still much more expensive on the switch port side, and consumes more power).
• To check the speed and width of a server’s PCI Express slots, try this:

grep Express /var/log/vmkernel.log |more

You need at least a 5.0Gb/s (Gen 2) x 8 slot to get the full line rate of a 10GbE card.

• With the newer Load Balanced Teaming Policy that came with vSphere 4.1, the traffic needs to hit 75% bandwidth utilization for 30 seconds on a pNIC for the load to be migrated.