iSCSI switches / port groups in esx 6.5

[cooper101]

Hi. Coming from esx 5.0 onto 6.5 and learning the changes.

My previous setup had a single vswitch with IP assigned to talk to the SAN controllers. That switch had two cards assigned for redundancy. On 6.5 im finding im having to make two vswitches be for each card because when I add the port group to software iscsi it tells me that it cannot save the changes because my port group had more than one card.

So ive created two switches 'iSCSI1' and 'iSCSI2' each with one card and both port groups added to software iSCSI. All works fine. However it doesnt really make sense. Especially when im now being prompted to tell me that I have no redundancy on either switch.

Whats the way round this? what have I done wrong? 

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

You can do either, create two vSwitches, each one with a single iSCSI port, and vmnic, or you can create a single vSwitch with two iSCSI port groups, and two vmnics. The point is that there's a one-to-one relationship between a portgroup, and a vmnic. In case of the single vSwitch configuration, you need to override the port group's Failover&Teaming settings, so that only one vmnic is active, and the other is unused.

Sample:

1 vSwitch with two vmnics (vmnic2, vmnic3) , both active at the vSwitch level

Portgroup "iSSCI-1" -> vminic2 (active), vmnic3 (unused)

Portgroup "iSSCI-2" -> vminic2 (unused), vmnic3 (active)

André

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[NathanosBlightc]

Please check following links:

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/vmware-multipathing-conf...

VMware Knowledge Base

[cooper101]

That makes sense. I presume the active/active settings stops the software iscsi settings from being applied when having two active cards in the port group. I'll try this. Doesn't make much sense to have two separate vSwitches, which is what I currently have and receive the warning that I have no redundancy.

Thanks for the help.