http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/planning?view=discussions Most recent forum messages en Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:57:43 GMT Clearspace 1.10.12 (http://jivesoftware.com/products/clearspace/) 2008-07-02T13:57:43Z en http://communities.vmware.com/message/984744?tstart=0#984744 <br /> Firstly: I said NetApp in the subject line but I'd imagine this question would also apply to lots of other IP-based SANs. <br /> <p /> <p /> <p /> We are in process of deploying an entirely new virtualised server environment based around ESX 3.5 &#38; a NetApp 2050A. All of our ESX storage will be IP based (mainly NFS, with a bit of iSCSI).<br /> <p /> For redundancy, we have 2 cross-connected pSwitches dedicated to IP storage, and each of the ESX servers has 2 teamed pNICs dedicated to storage traffic (1 pNIC connected to each swtich).<br /> <p /> <p /> <p /> My question is about how best to setup the NICs / IP addressing on the SAN to provide best performance and redundancy when operating with ESX. <br /> <p /> The 2050A has 2 GbE NICs per controller, each of which will be connected to a different pSwitch for redundancy. As far as I can see we have two options for how we configure these:<br /> <p /> Option 1:<br /> <p /> Set-up a single-mode vif spanning the 2 NICs (in non-NetApp speak, this is basically an active/passive fail-over setup) with a single IP address covering the vif. Set-up ESX IP storage to connect to the vif's IP address (only one path).<br /> <p /> If the active SAN NIC or pSwitch fails the SAN will fail-over to the second SAN NIC, keeping the same IP address (nothing has changed from the ESX host's point of view). <br /> <p /> Option 2:<br /> <p /> Configure a seperate IP address for each NIC (both NICs are active at once). Set-up ESX IP storage to use the first SAN NIC's IP address as the primary path to storage, and the second SAN NIC's IP address as a secondary path (fail-over) path.<br /> <p /> If the primary-path SAN NIC dies, ESX will have to fail-over to the secondary-path SAN NIC.<br /> <p /> <p /> <p /> As far as I can see, option #2 should offer better performance - I know ESX doesn't do iSCSI/NFS MPIO, but I assume we could alternate which SAN IP address is the primary path to the storage on each ESX host and therefore get some rudimentary load balancing across the SAN's NICs. <br /> <p /> On the other hand, I think option #1 "seems" to be a more elegant/reliable solution and should(?) offer faster recovery times, as the SAN handles fail-over in the event of a SAN NIC or pSwitch failure - as far as ESX is concerned nothing has happened. Using this option (which is how we currently have things setup) the fail-over time is less than a second when we pull the active SAN NIC's network cable. <br /> <p /> <p /> <p /> So, what do the experts think? Which is these options is better? What are others doing?<br /> <p /> Thanks in advance! Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:57:43 GMT mattjk http://communities.vmware.com/message/984744?tstart=0#984744 2008-07-02T13:57:43Z 1 year, 4 months ago