Optimal Networking Setup

[reesins]

I am not a networking engineer at all, so I am becoming a little lost on the best setup for our system.  We have 3 Dell 710 hosts that have 4 NIC's each.  We have a Drobo 1200i SAN with 3 iSCSI ports.  We have the Essentials Plus package.  Basically I want the best networking setup for this.  I was thinking of teaming NIC1 & NIC2 to Switch 1 from each host and teaming NIC3 & NIC4 to switch 2.  Then iSCSI1 & iSCSI2 to Switch 1 & iSCSI3 to Switch 2.

I don't know much about vLan's and managed switches. I just planned on getting 2 unmanaged Gig switches and having at it.

Should I go with 3 and just go nic1 to 1, nic 2 to 2 and nic 3 to 3 and have each iSCSI to a switch?

I basically need help in networking layman terms

[reesins]

Ok, so after doing alot of reading it seems my networking ideas are way to simple.  It definitely seems like I need to go the managed switch route with vLans for iSCSI, vMotion and LAN traffic and more NIC's on the servers.  This image by kendrick coleman is seeming like the ideal setup.  Anyone else have insight? 

[reesins]

and someone correct me if I am wrong, but it seems like if I wanted to go the unmanaged switch route and lose a little redundancy, I could go with 4 unmanaged switches.  1 for LAN, 1 for vMotion, and 2 for iSCSI.  Have a pNIC from each server going to each switch.

Excuse my bad visio picture

[dkraut]

Yeah, the physical unmanaged switch setup should work fine, but VLAN's are actually pretty easy to setup and would reduce your hardware footprint while giving you more flexibility down the road.  Another thought, in a perfect world with NIC's out the wazoo, it's nice to separate everything, but if you do not expect frequent vmotion, you can just leave vmotion and data on the same network.  I'd probably use 2 pNIC's per host for data/vmotion/management and the other 2 pNIC's for iSCSI.  You definitely want to separate iSCSI from all other traffic.