vSwitch - pNIC - iSCSI - MPIO

[Randles]

Hi Guys,

I'm about to setup the virtual networking for two new ESX boxes, and I was wondering what the communities throughts were in terms of usage of NICs.

I have 12 NICs on each Host.- I figured I'd assign 8 of them like this for redundancy and increased throughput;

2 NICs - vMotion (Teamed / Port Channel)

2 NICs - service console (Teamed / Port Channel)

4 NICs - vm network (Teamed / Port Channel)

Now the problem comes when I decide how to assign my 4 remaining iSCSI OE NICs - I want to have my Datastores on the SAN but I also want to use the software iSCSI initiators on the VMs to connect to file server volumes etc.

My iSCSI target is on a completely separate physical LAN with redundant switches I was hoping to have 4 iSCSI OE NICs using MPIO to face the SAN. Can I combine the vmkernal iSCSI traffic with the VM iSCSI traffic on the same vSwitch?

Is there a better approach that I am missing? Any advice appreciated

[purduecjs]

It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it. Have you considered just using the 4x1Gb for iSCSI and sticking with the ESX iSCSI initator instead of using the guest initiator? An alternative might be to split the 4x into two 2x configs ... 2x1GbE for ESX iSCSI, and 2x1GbE for VM iSCSI

[Randles]

I have considered it - just a bit worried about peak times on our file / source control server (once we've p2v'd)

The SAN solution we have uses 8 nics (4 active) and MPIO - was hoping with MAC address hashing to gets some good load balancing across the pNICs.

I've noticed that I needed to add a Service Console connection on the same subnet to get the ESX box to discover the iSCSI targets 😮

[s_buerger]

As i know iSCSI in vsphere4 does not need a service console for discovery anymore.

[Randles]

I'm going to give that a try again then ! I couldn't get it to discover