Connecting my ESX server to multiple targets on ISCSI

[rabih_00]

Hello everyone.

I currently have 5 ESX servers connected to 1 Netapp filer over ISCSI which I think is a bottle neck or will be soon. (getting high on CPU). would it be possible to connect the same servers to another filer and have the VMs distributed among filers, or at least, any new VM implementation will go to the new filer?

the servers are running in a DRA and HA cluster.

Thanks

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

As long as the new host can reach the new filers it should work fine - But before doing that I I would look at the networking = How many iSCSI ports do you have on your ESX hosts? How many NIC are on the Filer? Is the iSCSI network isolated and just for iSCSI traffic or is it shared? The high CPU is it on the Filer or your ESX hosts? If it is on the ESX Hosts how many VMs are your running?

[rabih_00]

I have already looked at all that. I have enough ports to support a new target with redundancy. the filer I am planning to use is not in production yet, so ports are still not used up.

Our ISCSI network is isolated, nothing else goes on that subnet.

the high CPU is on the filer itself, this is why I am looking into adding another filer to the equation here. the esx themselves are not high on CPU yet.

Did you try this yourself.. do you have any documentation to support this? I could nto find any myself.

Thanks for the info

[IRIX201110141]

IIRC your ESX servers can be connected up to 8 different iSCSI targets. After that you can use svmotion to spread your VMs to differrent storages which are located on different filers.

regards

Joerg