NICs or HBA's for accessing iSCSI SANs?

[woodsp]

Hello,

I'm a traditionalist and am thinking of using HBA's to talk to my iSCSI SAN.

I was then told that I should use the HBA to connect to the SAN on the host, but use iSCSI initiator software in our Windows 2003 VMs, for performance. When I try to do this, I cannot connect to the storage via the iSCSI initiator. I have also been told that using NICs to connect to the iSCSI SAN will allow me to use the iSCSI initiator to see the SAN and use the storage.

I'm confused? what should I use? Any solution will have to allow for VMotion and DRS across hosts.

Help!

Paul

[uslacker99]

Your question is confusing too. You can use iSCSI hardware initiators for connecting to iSCSI SANs and connect to them via ESX or you can use a regular NIC and do the same. VMotion/DRS will work in this scenario.

If you use a VM's software initiator to do this, it will also work, but where will you store the VMs?

What data will your iSCSI SAN hold? If it's the VMDK files, you should use the software or hardware initiator in ESX and not worry about the software initiator inside the VMs.

Unless you can get clarity on your problem, I suggest you call tech support.

[JasonF88 · Accepted solution]

Main advantage of HBAs is the ability to boot from SAN, there should be a performance advantage from HBAs but I don't believe it's massive.

If you don't need to boot from SAN go for NICs.

We are using NICs and the ESX iSCSI Software initiator for "system disks" on VMFS Volumes the the OS iSCSI initiator within the VM

to get to native (not VMFS) data volumes.