Hello, I'm setting up a FreeNAS box on our network with iSCSI to store backups and other data. My question is about how to configure networking on ESXi.
According to Freenas docs and forum discussions, each Freenas interface needs to be on a separate subnet. The vmware iscsi mpio doc states "Enabling multipathing removes the ability to route to storage. The storage and the VMkernel port must have an IP address in the same network".
Here's what I have for iSCSI interfaces on all my storage devices:
FreeNAS storage - 4x1GB Intel NICs
Cisco NAS storage - 2x1GB NICs
IBM SAN storage - 2x1GB NICs
Backup server - 4x1GB Intel NICs (Vmware 5.5 vm running Veeam)
We have 2 Cisco 3560G switches, and all interfaces are divided up evenly between the 2 switches for redundancy.
So if I understand this correctly, if I want to use MPIO and be able to access all 3 of my storage devices above, my backup server needs to have 8 NICs? I was hoping connections to the various storage devices would be able to share NICs, and route traffic between VLANs which reside on the same switch. But if I follow the Freenas best practice and each NIC is on a separate VLAN, then it's impossible to connect everything unless I add more NICs. Am I right in that assumption?
Thanks much in advance!
