The Citrix documentation speaks volumes about NIC bonding, separating management and VM data, but is it so terrible to run a XenServer host with only a single NIC?
The server that we have access to only accesses the network through a single NIC. Will this become a problem when we want to incorporate a second Host for high availability?
The VMs are all locally stored and do not run from network storage.
Thanks!
No, not terrible. Just remember that all traffic, be it management traffic or VM data traffic, will be fighting for the same bandwidth. If the total traffic will not saturate the bandwidth, there's no strong reason to use multiple connections, except one:
If you bond two (or more) interfaces, if one port dies, traffic will automagically be using the other port. If you only have a single connection, that would mean a frantic run to the server room to unplug the cabling.
That said, if you're concerned with High Availability, why use the Local Storage? You really should use a Shared Storage (i.e., a network-attached storage) to allow VM migration between hosts in a pool.
