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Anders_Gregerse
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

10Gbit Nic working ?

We are moving to an iSCSI based SAN in our vmware installation and it works fine, but I'm getting tired of all the wiring for each host with Nic's for COS, vmotion, iscsi and vmnics. I'm using 4-6 gbit ports on each host to provide enough redundancy and bandwidth, and it would be nice to able to reduce it to 2 ports per host. But as the HCL clearly misses is 10gbit nics, but have anyone tested to see if there is a working one out there?

Just me planning for the future

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BenConrad
Expert
Expert

I hear you about the cable situation..... but just think of how many cables you would need with physical hosts that attach to a SAN Smiley Happy

I run 4 Gb connections per host, that's it.

2 are for multiple vlans including vmotion, COS and my data networks. The other 2 are for my 2 HBA iSCSI connections.

If I need more network bandwidth I'll add another Gb connection.

If you went with 2 10Gb / host you would be needing a lot of 10Gb switches, that can get expensive too although HP as a 8 port 10Gb for about $5500...

Ben

Anders_Gregerse
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

With quadcore cpu's and 4 way servers 4 Gb wont be enough. With 10Gb I could use 2 nic ports and it would be enough even for an 8 way quadcore server instead of using 4-8 1 Gb nic ports. 10Gbit switches are expensive but they are beginning to get cheaper that FC switches, so are the nics.

Anders

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christianZ
Champion
Champion

Well with iscsi esx software initiator I haven't seen even 1 Gbit link (full duplex) that could be saturated yet ? What do you want to do with 10 Gb nic now.

The first problem is the software initiator in esx - it is sluggish IMHO.

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farkasharry
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

YEah, the software iSCSI initiator caused us also some trouble. After using the Broadcom ISCSI adapters everything runs fine! Smiley Happy

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farkasharry
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

We had an issue with 8 physical 10gb ports on one ESXi 4.1 U1 host. Regarding to vmware, only 4 physical 10gbit NIC´s are supported currently!

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farkasharry
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Of course, you shouldnt forget to use vmxnet3 to use all the advanced features of 10gbit, JumboFrames, etc...

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