Vista - dual nics and many vm's.. best practice advice?

I run about 8 VM's on our 2003 x64 host server.. it was suggested to me, that
the issues i have been having recently, where i have to reboot the whole host
or repair individual guest nic connections, may be due to the fact i have too
many guests on the single gigabit nic in the server (i havent had the other
one enabled in the past)..

I also saw another thread in here, someone mentioned that in fact, having
dual nics on a server doesnt really do much good in itself.. except for maybe
dedicating one to the host and one to the vm's? (IE: clear all check boxes
on the nic that i want to be visible to VM's?)..

I initially was thinking it best to take 4 of the 8 and put them on the
other nic, but in their config settings, i only see one of the two host
nics.. and both host nicks have the virtual network option checked, but
again, from the sounds of the other thread, this may not help?

What would i be best off doing here? Simply clearing all but the virtual
part on the one nic and having the other one for the host? (how do i make
the other nic show up as well, in the vm console?)

Right now, i seem to be getting about 125mb/s on each VM.. the main host has
the single gigabit card enabled .. its also not clear to me if bandwidth is
supposed to be shared (unevenly) with the host or not? IE: 1 gigabit
bandwidth possible in a single VM if it calls for it like vmware?

Thanks in advance on this..

"markm75" <markm75@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0CCE6FE4-20CA-4742-899E-F0E7FD63DEED@xxxxxxAs Charlie said in the other thread, virtual networks connected to a
physical NIC are not magic. They cannot run faster than the underlying
physical network.

Having two NICs, each connected to its own switch port on the physical
switch, would theoretically give you better network performance in the vms.
You really need to know what each vm is doing before you can attempt to load
balance the I/O.

There is no "best practice" which suits all situations. Eight vms on one
NIC could be quite adequate in some situations while two vms on one NIC
could be a bottleneck. If a vm does a lot of I/O it might need a dedicated
physical NIC.

If you are getting about 125 Mb/s in each vm you are doing very well
(and the host can't be using much at all!) Have you measured what throughput
you can get with just one vm running?

"Bill Grant" wrote:
I havent had a chance to try shutting some down and seeing how the
throughput is yet..

But i was thinking as suggested in here, that our recent odd behavior of the
vm's was due to the dual nic thing..

IE: last nite.. i rebooted the server.. i couldnt ping a few of the VM's..
yet, in the console they showed up as running, etc.. my only recourse was to
"shut down guest os", which actually showed it shutting down (despite no ping
or ability to get into it, only a thumbnail was seen)..

And before, where i could get into a vm, even though it couldnt be pinged,
but once in, if i repaired the virtual connection it came back to life all
around.. no event viewer messages to indicate what is going on here..
everything has been fine until a few days ago/after rebooting etc..

i've also had one VM 2008 machine say that it had lost communication, it may
have crashed etc.. with the thumbnail stuck on the login screen, even abile
to get into it, but couldnt click or type.. had to do a hard virtual reset a
few times on this one too (probably an issue with 2008 perhaps, or this 2008
vm, separate from the other issue)