iSCSI failover - 10GB to 1GB

[cgrvy]

Hi,

I have a customer who only has one 10GB switch and cant get another one at the moment. He has a few 1GB switches that he can use though.

For iSCSI, has anyone done anything like this or is there any reason why it would be a bad design?

iSCSI portgroup with 1 x 10GB port set to active and 1 x 1GB set to standby

another iSCSI portgroup with a different 1 x 10GB port set to active and 1 x 1GB set to standby

I'm trying to protect in case the 10GB switch goes down....

Does this have any impact on port binding etc? Any particular configs I need to set to the physical network ports? etc!

Many thanks!

[schepp]

Hi,

standby vmnics are not allowed when using port binding. You may only use one vmnic per iSCSI vmkernel. The other vmnics have to be configured as "unused".

Tim

[jkoebrunner]

Yes you can do that but you have to check some things:

- I would configure only two ISCSI VMkernels: one 10G and one 1G

- iSCSI Multi-Pathing Policy should be set to active on the 10G links only (Policy: Fixed (VMW_PSP_FIXED))

- You should monitor your bandwidth usage of the 10G link, so you can tell if a failover to the 1G links would cause a bottleneck.