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royml
Contributor
Contributor

Small vShere 4 san configuration

Does someone have any recommendations about this small san configuration we are planning to use

according to performance issues:

- dual controller low-end HP msa iSCSI san

- 2 1Gb switches

- 2 ESXi hosts with 4 NICS (2 NICS to SAN, 2 NICS to seperate network)

- vShere 4

- total about max 8 VM's, a few windows DC's and a few member servers.

- only HA, no vMotion

1. Is it better to use 6 NICS per ESXi host?

2. Since this is vShere4 with a few servers is it wise to make the configuration as simple as possible?:

- one RAID 5 + hotspare, one LUN, one VMFS volume

- each VM a C: vmdk and a 😧 vmdk, also domain controllers

3. Is it possible to use the dual controller msa with one RAID 5 + hotspare or is it better to

have 2 RAID 5 configurations? One per controller?

Any comments are greatly appreciated.

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Peter_Grant
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'd say you can more than likely get away with 4 NICs per host for what you've described (assuming 1 Gbs NICs). If it were me I'd use 4 in the following config:

2 x vSwitches

vSwitch0 for iSCSI with 2 NICS

- Configure 2 x VMkernel ports for this switch and bind each to a specific NIC. Do this by setting each NIC to Active on a respective NIC (in the NIC teaming section of the vSwitch0) and Unused for the other NIC

- At the SSH command line use the command to bind the iSCSI s/w initiator to the NICs using the following commands

esxcli –-server ----


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