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Dennist777
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Doable or just plain dumb - crossover cables

I am upgrading our Essentials install to Enterprise Plus.  I have been using DAS but will be moving to a NFS datastore on our NAS.  We currently have 3 hosts with virtually no chance of that changing in the near future.  I have 10G networking infrastructure but I'd like to maximize the host/NAS data rate.  However I've blown the budget so there's no funds for a >10GB switch.    Can I do the Host/NAS networking using 40GB NICs and crossover cables?  I have the NICs and there is room in the hosts and NAS for them.  

If it is doable, do I assign a unique IP to each NIC?  Will Vsphere know that it is the same datastore even if the IP used to access is different? 

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alantz
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I guess if your NAS has 3 - 40Gb ports and and all of your hosts have 40Gb ports and you run cat 8 cable between them I don't see why not. The downside is no redundancy of any kind unless your NAS has 6 - 40Gb ports.

--Alan--

 

 

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Dennist777
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I have a second NAS I plan on using.  That NAS however, only has room for 2 40G ports plus 2 native 10G ports.  The NICs I have (Mellanox MCX414A-BCAT) are dual port so I do have 2 40G ports on each host..  If I do a datastore cluster I'm assuming that won't be an issue as DRP in I/O latency mode will not have a problem with one connection being 10Gb, other than shying away from it for latency reasons.  

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Dennist777
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Oh, and in this setup all that can fail on the network side is the NIC or the interconnect.  Both of which are pretty far down on the potential failure list.

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alantz
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Enthusiast

With each host directly accessing storage at least technically it should work, the downside is most people want to have the ability to storage migrate and if each host can't see each other then I doubt storage migration will work.

--Alan--

 

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