Separate VLANS for ISCSI and management

[jcp2mill]

Hi I'm relatively new to vmware so apologies if these are stupid questions, I have set up a vcentre installation that currently runs 3 VMS however I'd like to add more. My hardware has four physical NICs and my preferred option was to use two of them for ISCSI and two for the management network.

I've sucessfully added ISCSI storage before but only when it was on the same subnet as the management network and ideally I would like the two types of traffic to be completely physically isolated. I have external vlans configured through a switch (untagged) port based and am not quite sure where to go from here can each vlan be configured through ports or do I need a separate vswitch or are vlans only possible in vmware if tagged?

[daphnissov]

You should be using a separate switch for IP storage traffic. It's best to look up the storage guide in your version of vSphere for some basics on configuration and best practices to follow as there are numerous.

[Tech0Addict]

Hi jcp2mill,

If your network connectivity is untagged so you are transfer all vlans as Trunk .

You need to create the vmkernel of the ISCSI with the vlan_id of the network.

Please provide more details on your network topology .

4 Physical NICs , each nic connected to a switch ?

the port on the switch is access or trunk ?

what is the vlan of the ISCSI ?

how many vSwitchs you created on your ESXi and which vmnic used as uplink ?

Avi.

[jcp2mill]

Hi Avi,

4 physical nics two connected to my main 192.168.0.xxx subnet for mangement etc and two connected to a completely separate switch for ISCSI 192.168.64.xxx , each vlan has a connection to the same external router for email messaging etc but the router has port based vlans defined so port 5 and 6 are 64 for example and 1 and 2 are 0.

The router supports tagging although not currently used but the ISCSI switch does not and is currently set to access rather than trunk.

currently I only have one vswitch defined this was one of the things I was unsure of, whether I should create a new vswitch to represent the ISCSI vlan.

[Tech0Addict · Accepted solution]

So if i understand you,

you have 4 ports that are configures as ACCESS , (vLAN 0 and vLAN 64)

Please create a new vSwitch with the 2 nics of the ISCSI.

create 2 vmkernel ports and give each vmkernel port an IP of the ISCSI segment . (192.168.64.xxx)

give each vmkernel ports 1 dedicated nic (for example - vmk1 - active upllink vmnic2 and unused upplink vmnic3)

then create iscsi software initiator and bind the two vmkernel of the ISCSI .

you can find step by step in this url:

How to configure ESXi 6.5 for iSCSI Shared Storage – 4sysops

Avi.