• Bond network interfaces, especially on production hosts. Bonding improves the overall availability of service, as well as network bandwidth. See Network Bonding in the Administration Guide.

  • A stable network infrastructure configured with DNS and DHCP records.

  • If bonds will be shared with other network traffic, proper quality of service (QoS) is required for storage and other network traffic.

  • For optimal performance and simplified troubleshooting, use VLANs to separate different traffic types and make the best use of 10 GbE or 40 GbE networks.

  • If the underlying switches support jumbo frames, set the MTU to the maximum size (for example, 9000) that the underlying switches support. This setting enables optimal throughput, with higher bandwidth and reduced CPU usage, for most applications. The default MTU is determined by the minimum size supported by the underlying switches. If you have LLDP enabled, you can see the MTU supported by the peer of each host in the NIC’s tool tip in the Setup Host Networks window.

    If you change the network’s MTU settings, you must propagate this change to the running virtual machines on the network: Hot unplug and replug every virtual machine’s vNIC that should apply the MTU setting, or restart the virtual machines. Otherwise, these interfaces fail when the virtual machine migrates to another host. For more information, see After network MTU change, some VMs and bridges have the old MTU and seeing packet drops and BZ#1766414.

  • 1 GbE networks should only be used for management traffic. Use 10 GbE or 40 GbE for virtual machines and Ethernet-based storage.

  • If additional physical interfaces are added to a host for storage use, clear VM network so that the VLAN is assigned directly to the physical interface.