Switching to 10GB iSCSI

[joeytmann]

Starting to plan a project to switch my hosts over from 1GB to 10GB. Hosts are setup with 2 kernel ports in the same vSwitch for iSCSI traffic(a physical nic is active only on a single kernel port, ie vmnic7 is active in iSCSI, and 8 is active in the other). There is a seperate vSwitch for VMFT and vMotion traffic and setup in a similar fashion.  I am under the assumption that when I add the 10GB cards to the hosts and power back up, I just add to the proper kernel ports and vSwitches as needed and I should see the SAN's LUNs.

here is a pic of a hosts iSCSI config.

Also, I know its probably not ideal to have the hosts on different speed connections, and should get all hosts switched over as quickly as possible. What are some possible problems if they are not the same for say, a month or so? I don't want to do more than one host in my weekend downtime window so with 4 hosts, this could take me a month to complete.

[SureshKumarMuth · Accepted solution]

My understanding is you are asking what will happen if the hosts are of different configuration (i.e one host with 1GB cards and other with 10GB cards)?

I dont think that will be an issue atleast with respect to storage connection speed/management traffic or VM traffic, your performance on host with 10GB will be faster than 1Gb card. You can do it one at a time without any issues. For FT I am not sure if that will cause any issues and you need to worry only if you have FT enabled on VMs.

[joeytmann]

FT is on for vm's to switch hosts, if a host goes down and for load balancing. Is there a particular setting I should be looking for on the VMs?

[SureshKumarMuth]

for FT enabled VMs we no need to worry much as if the host which has the FT enabled VM goes down, FT will take care of creating new VM on other host which is an automated process provided we should have enough bandwidth. FT network requirement varies from version to version, we need to have 10GB speed recommended where as  minimum requirement is  1GB. In your case I think 1GB is there as you use 10GB card which is sufficient. However, during the process of swapping cards, you may watchout for FT errors in webclient.

[joeytmann]

Just did a double check, and I don't have FT for VM's enabled. Actually not licensed for it. So I should be good to go.