Hi everyone - Looking for a quick answer here as we need to get this going ASAP - so I appreciate your quick responses!
We are installing a new setup with a baby iSCSI Clariion w/ redundant controllers, 3x DL380 ESX servers each with 2x QLA4050 iSCSI HBAs, and are trying to figure out what network switches would be best suited for this. We want 2x switches for redundancy. Each switch will connect to a controller in the Clariion, and each switch will connect to one of the HBAs in the servers.
We want to go with HP... but I'm having a hard time justifying purchasing a 2800 or 2900 over the 1800, and here is why...
The 1800-24G (according to HP's quick specs) supports the following:
24 port gigabit switch
Jumbo Frames (I know, I know, ESX does not support them anyway)
Flow Control
Up to 35.7 million pps (48Gbps switching capacity) - Is this per port or per chassis? The documentation is unclear.
This switch will support port based vlans - but I don't care about that since it is a flat storage network anyway, this switch will be dedicated to iSCSI traffic.
Cost is rougly $350 per switch.
The 2824 supports the following:
24 port gigabit
Jumbo Frames
Flow Control
The switching capacity says 34.65 million pps (less than the 1800)??? How could this be?
This is a true layer 3 switch - supports routing between vlans and also does other high level things like trunking, spanning tree protocol, QoS, etc. (again, do I really care about these features for a flat storage network)???
Cost is roughly $1700 per switch.
The 2900-24G supports the following:
24 port gigabit
Jumbo Frames
Flow Control
Switching capacity is higher here - 74 million pps throughput (115Gbps switching capacity)
True layer 3, has 4x 10GBe ports, will do everything that the 2824 does plus port mirroring, MAC filtering, etc.
Cost is roughly $2400 per switch
So you see my dilemma. It seems like everyone here says not to use the 1800s for iSCSI. My question is WHY? It has the same (slightly better) throughput than the 2824 (which is $1500 per swithc more expensive). It seems to me like the only reason you would want the 2824 or 2900-24G is if you were to take advantage of all of the advanced switching features - which for our implementation is not needed.
Do you disagree? Is there a reason that I'm not seeing that would justify spending $1500 extra per switch? Is there something else I should be looking for?
vExpert 2012, 2013 | VCDX #81 | @huberw
