Vsphere 5 ISCSI Network Design

[rommelh23]

Hi VMWARE Experts. This is my first post in the community forum and would like to seek enlightenment. I have been reading a lot as part of my Vsphere 5.0 deployment in a few months. I am having mixed readings regarding the ISCSI VMkernel design. I am planning to put the ISCSI VMKernel ports in one vswitch and my question is do I put the ISCSI ip addresses on the same subnet or on a different subnet? I have seen both setup configured, are there any pros and cons for both?

Thanks a lot!

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - The iSCSI network shoud be on its own subnet different from the subnets used for management, vmotioin, the VMs etc -

[rommelh23]

hi weinstein5, thx for the respnse. Yes, the management, vmotion, vm traffic are on their own subnet, I am referring solely to the ISCSI network, say I have 4 NICS to be used for ISCSI and i will put them all in one vswitch. Do i configure each ISCSI VMkernel IPs on separate subnets? Or is it perfectly fine to have them in the same subnet?

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

whether to use a single or multiple subnets for iSCSI depends on your storage system. I setup a VNX5300 lately and with this system you will use a separate subnet for each controller port (i.e. one subnet for port0 on both controllers and another subnet for port1 on both controllers).

André

[rommelh23]

thx for the reply. Its what Im looking for. Will be checking Dell documentations

[eeg3]

Since you mentioned Dell, are you using Equallogics? If so, they have a multipath plugin and script (post references 4.x, but the setup for 5.0 is the same) that will setup your iSCSI networking pretty automatically.