Adding vmk nic to vmhba

[trickybits]

In terms of iSCSI, is it best-practice to bind your vmk port to the software HBA?

Issuing this command will list the nics found for the vmhba:

esxcli swiscsi nic list -d vmhba33

And in my case it finds none, since I haven't bound any nics to the vmhba, and yet it seems iSCSI traffic works well without it.

What's the use of adding a vmk nic to the vmhba? What am I missing?

Thanks!

[lamw · Accepted solution]

If you want to leverage the new iSCSI multipathing with vSphere, you'll need at least 2 VMkernel interfaces to use multiple iSCSI sessions and you'll want to bind VMkernl nics to a given vmnic. Take a look at this article that explains the details - http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/03/18/iscsi-multipathing-with-esxcliexploring-the-next-version-of-...

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[trickybits]

Thanks for the response. I suspected it had to do with multipathing, thanks for the confirmation William