Seeking Advice: VI3 network considerations with iSCSI SAN

[Sevinfooter]

Good morning, folks! I know this has all been beat to death, but I have to do it. I'm planning for VI3 on 2 IBM xseries servers with an IBM iSCSI SAN. My servers have 1 HBA, 2 TOEnics, 3 GE nics. I'm putting the iSCSI traffic on its on physical network with 2GE switches ready for rudundancy.

Can someone please suggest some good configuration for the HBA, TOE and nics. I do plan on booting the VMs from SAN, and boot ESX from local disk. Servers will have a mix of exchange, file servers, sql servers, terminal servers.

I'm currenlty leanning toward 1pnic for SC/VMotion, 2 pNics for VMs, but not sure how I should treat the TOEs and HBA for the iSCSI.

[jeremypage]

They should look like any other HBA, just make sure they are plugged into different switches.

I'm doing the same but with a NetApp 3070 with NFS as the backend instead of using iSCSI.

[Sevinfooter]

That raises three more questions for me. First, how does the NFS performance compare to iSCSI SAN? Second, do you dedicate the HBA AND TOE all to iSCSI? Third, should the SC and VMKernal also share one of the TOE or HBA for iSCSI?

[christianZ]

You can't use iscsi hba and iscsi software initiator in Esx simultaneously. Therefore it would be better to have 2 iscsi hbas in each esx host. The iscsi hbas will be seen as scsi controllers - you don't need then any vmkernel port for iscsi.

[jeremypage]

You don't need a vmkernel port for an iSCSI HBA, it looks like a normal HBA to the system.

[Sevinfooter]

So, then how do you get ESX to recognize a TOE adapter as an HBA? I'd hate to have to have to have the CPU do the TCP processing for a TOEnic. ESX just sees them as nics, and shows my HBA as being the only available hardware storage adapter.

[christianZ]

Toe Nics aren't supported by Esx 3.0.2

[Sevinfooter]

I just installed 3.5 this morning. Still piling through the docs.

[christianZ · Accepted solution]

For now you won't find any toe nic in 3.5 too - it will be added later, I heard