ESX 4 - Shared Storage NFS, iSCSI

[kcucadmin]

ok,

is it a problem to use the same NIC for simultanious NFS and iSCSI Data Store Connections? or should i really have a Dedicated NIC for each protocol?

my nic isn't anywhere close to being saturated, but just wondering if that could be a cause of performance issues.

ok, I have 3 nics in a vswitch, i have to vmkernal ports. 10.140.80.118,10.140.80.228. my NFS mounts are at 10.140.80.203, and 10.140.80.202.

how do i get some NFS mounts to use a specific nic, or does esx load balance this?

[J_Wood]

I'm sure somebody will correct me if I am wrong but I don't beleive you can specify which vmk port you can use for storage transactions. Best practices says to use separate vmk ports for vMotion and fault tolerance. That being said you can set a preference for different vmnics on the vswitch. For example, vSwitch1 has two vmnics, vmnic2 and vmnic3. Leave both vmnics active at the vswitch level then set vmk0 to use vmnic2 as primary vmknic3 as secondary or failover. vmk1 would be the invers of this.

As far as I know, ESX will pick the path to use for storage transactions on NFS or iSCSI.

JAMES WOOD | SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR | ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION

Phoenix, Arizona

[kcucadmin]

yeah that's pretty much what im doing. just ESX is only using one adapter for NFS. which is fine, but i think it's also using the same nic for iSCSI. i guess i could move my iSCSI targets to another Subnet to make sure a different NIC is used.