vSphere Storage Appliance

Is there a limit to the number of vmkernal ports that can be created on a vSwitch?

We have just brought a Netapp FAS3140 online which has multistore enabled (enables the filer to be broken into secure vfilers)

Each vfiler is assigned to a ip space which in turn is assigned to a van which keeps traffic to the vfilers separate. We would like the ESX hosts to have visibility to each of these vlans so we can create NFS datastores on every vfiler created.

To achieve this I would need to add 1 x vmkernel port per vfiler network but this concerns me because I am unclear on what the impact of 20 vmkernel ports would have on the storage network. Should I be concerned?

I should say that our ESX host have 2 dedicated nics for storage.

Netapp publishes best practice guides and I would use that as a guide. http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/2010/08/free-book---vsphere-on-netapp-best-practices.html

Thanks for the reply.

That document doesn't give the answer to the question. In fact it doesn't even make referance to using many vfilers. I have seen this question asked before and the thread was never answered.

Has anyone else got any thoughts of the question?

Have you contacted Netapp support?

Yes sir. Case is open.