Back in the ESX 2.5 days it was a common recommendation to have at least 3 NICs for ESX. One NIC each for the service console, VMotion, and VMs. It was really a waste for many to have to dedicate an entire NIC for the low network traffic to the service console. Then with ESX 3 the networking features became more flexible, and you could easily setup the service console to share a NIC with VMotion or the VMs.

The M600 and M605 blades for the Dell M1000e blades chassis now have two on-board NICs and the option to add two more I/O cards, each with two ports of either Ethernet or fibre channel. This means that you can have four NICs and two fibre channel ports for storage OR six NICs with 2 dedicated to iSCSI for storage. The four available NICs for VM data traffic is usually enough, although I admit there are always exceptions.

So if the I/O options on the blades are not enough there are options with the R805 and R900 and R905 that offer oodles of NICs. Specifically the R805 has four on-board NICs and four PCI slots. Filling these slots with your required mix of quad-port NICs and dual-port fibre channel HBAs would be a great solution for environments that have high requirements of physical NICs to support their VMware environment.

Todd