VMware vsphere essentials plus network cabling

Solution 1:

See this list of cabling strategies for various numbers of physical NIC interfaces.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/taxonomy/term/17790

For your case, you have FOUR physical NICs (pNIC). Here's the explanation of best practices for that setup:

pNIC0 -> vSwitch0 -> Portgroup0 (service console)
................. -> Portgroup1 (VMotion)
pNIC1 -> vSwitch0 -> Portgroup2 (Storage Network)
pNIC2 -> vSwitch1 -> Portgroup3 (VM Network)
pNIC3 -> vSwitch1 -> Portgroup3 (VM Network)

Solution 2:

Assuming that you are using iSCSI to connect to your SAN, you'll want at least 8 GigE ports on your VMware Hosts. You'll want 2 for the management port, 2 for vMotion, 2 for iSCSI and 2 for Guest machines (or more than 2 depending on how many vLANs you want, and if they need to have separate physical NICs or not).

Now each pair of NICs should also be on a seperate vLAN to isolate the network traffic as well. If you have less than 8 physical NICs then you run the risk of an outage if a network card, cable or network switch were to fail.