question about equallogic ps5000

[wb2]

Here's one for the equallogic guys. Hope this is acceptable posting an equallogic question even if this is a vmware forum....

I've read on this forum that it's best to completely isolate iscsi traffic on it's own switch. My question is, how do I remotely manage something like this, or configure the equallogic email alarms, etc if it's isolated? I don't believe it has a port reserved for just managing it does it?

[paul_xtravirt]

I'm not that familiar with the requallogic kit, but as far as the iscsi traffic goes, it can go on the same switch one that is running over traffic and services; you should just vlan the iscsi traffic off. If you need to run software that needs to talk to that vlan (eg the iscsi traffic) you could run it on a VM, give it two NICs and then allocate one to the iscsi network, or, provide a gateway on the vlan so a virtual machine could get to the traffic if needs be.

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[glynnd1]

It is possible with 4.x and above firmware to set the last eth port to be a management only port, however you've now reduced the number of ports available to iSCSI traffic by one...

At the VLAN level you need to permit certain ports open in and out of the iSCSI VLAN. Outbound, NTP, email and SMTP, inbound web and ssh ports.

[wb2]

I've read that even vlan isn't recommended because of the overhead that occurs on the switch. Is this not true?

I'm surprised the equallogics just don't have an extra port available for managing them like my EMC fiber SAN.

[paul_xtravirt]

Many people just VLAN the iscsi traffic off. if you look at this document it does reference the use of vlans to isolate iscis traffic.

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[AndreTheGiant]

how do I remotely manage something like this

The solution are:

- use firmware 4.x and configure a management port (as post before)

- route the LAN or the VLAN (as post before)

- simply create a VM network on your iSCSI vSwitch and put a VM with 2 interface, one to the iSCSI network, and one to the LAN; than use this VM for management, NTP, SMTP relay, syslog, ...

Andrea