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aravinds3107
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

ESXi 4.1 iSCSI setup

Hello,

We are in the preparation of setting up 2 ESXi4.1 server and we are using EMC celerra storage. We are planning in to use iSCSI setup and will have 4 NICS for IP storage.

Our idea is to create VMkernel ports on all physical NICS and all physical NiCS to a single vswitch.

Would like to get some other possible scenarios to configure the iSCSI storage.

Thanks!!

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FranckRookie
Leadership
Leadership

Hi Aravinds3107,

I'm almost sure you should find some best-practice document from EMC. Anyway, as a rule it is always recommended to have a dedicated physical NIC per vmkernel, and vice versa. Whether you have all ports on a single vswitch or a dedicated one for every pNIC-vmkernel pair is not very important.

You can have a look at the following article. You can also read this thread.

Good luck.

Regards

Franck

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baskam
Contributor
Contributor

You might want to play with nic bonding on storage side, but we had mixed success with that so I don't fully recommend it. I can give you more details if you choose this to be your preferred path of deployment. You will probably be best off with multipathing and jumbo frames in an implementation best described in the article mentioned by Franck above. We use rr multipathing in this type of implementations!

Best,

Baska Walsh

Logicworks,

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