A network team is designing a new switch infrastructure and wants to keep VM traffic...

To achieve logical traffic separation while minimizing physical ports (using the same physical uplinks for multiple traffic types), Nutanix AHV networking best practices recommend the use of 802.1Q VLAN tagging.

The standard validated design is to:

Place the CVM and AHV Host management/storage interfaces on the Native VLAN (untagged) or a specific management VLAN.

Place User VM (Guest) traffic on Tagged VLANs.

This configuration allows storage replication traffic (CVM) and user traffic (VMs) to share the same physical cables (minimizing port usage) while remaining logically isolated at the switch level. Options like separate virtual switches (Option B) often require dedicated physical uplinks, which violates the requirement to minimize ports.