ISCSI Design question

[rico4400]

Hello community

I am asking a practical question following the design of an iscsi architecture.

We're going to have 14 ESXi (vSphere 6.5) each with 2 network cards (10 GbE), connected to 2  different cisco switches (for redudancy)

The SAN device will have 8 10GbE iscsi ports

Network team build 2 séparates subnet network and vlan, so we can't use iscsi port binding

Do we need to create on ESXi server 2 software iSCSI adapters , bind each vmkernel/vmnic individually to each software iSCSI adapter?

Thanks for your input

Cheers

Ricco

[a_p_]

Short answer: It depends.

You'll need to see how the storage vendor implemented iSCSI access. Some storage arrays require multiple different subnets, whereas others work with a single subnet. Please check the vendor's documentation, and Best Practices guides for how to setup the iSCSI network.

André

[rico4400]

Thanks Andre for your reply

Yes storage vendor recommandation is to use different subnetwork.

As we're using separate network switches (not aggregate), we want to put 4 iSCSI ports from storage to one subnet, with one 10 GbE network card from ESXi , and the other 4 iSCSI storage port + the second 10 GbE card from ESXi.

According VMware KB 2038869, we must not use port binding in this case, but it seems we can have only one software iSCSI adapter per host.

So what is the correct method for binding iscsi vmkernel (2 vmk in our case) with the software iscsi adapter.

Riccoco3882038869

[a_p_]

Hmm, I wasn't really aware of this, and always added the network adapters to the iSCSI port binding (and never had any issues).

The article actually contradicts with the vendor documentations (e.g. EMC VNX) I read so far.

Anyway, in this case don't add any of the 2 network adapters to the port binding section, and only enter the targets in the Software iSCSI settings.

André