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ESXi - iSCSI

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  • iSCSI
  • Business Computing
Last response: in Business Computing
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September 17, 2013 1:20:45 PM

Hello, all. This is my first build so please forgive the noobery.

The ESXi box I built is for lab/test purposes. I'm playing with AD, vCenter, SQL, and some products from work. Also used for playing around in different OS's.

The core switch is a CISCO SG300-10. I've setup VLANs for the management network, the VM network, and IPMI.

My FreeNAS box was designated to be an iSCSI target with a 500GB file extent for VM templates.

I put an Intel PRO 1000 PT Dual Port adapter in both ESXi and the FreeNAS box. I connected all four ports to the switch with two VLANs. I did this because I wanted to try out the multipath round robin for iSCSI. The ESXi and FreeNAS ports were bonded to similar VLANs, i.e. NIC A - NIC A on VLAN 4, NIC B - NIC B on VLAN 5.

This worked. Multipathing seemed to work fine, and a cable unplug confirmed failover worked as well.

Having said all of this, this setup maxed out the ports on my switch. Since I don't have a second host, I decided to plug the ESXi dual ports DIRECTLY into the FreeNAS dual ports, and free up four ports on the switch. As expected, this works perfectly fine.

Now (finally) onto my question. I don't intend (at this time) to share the iSCSI with another host, and the wife will prevent another host from appearing for awhile. With this in mind... am I doing it "right"? Is this a crackhead way to set it up?

Like I said, it works either way, but I'm hoping someone (anyone) who knows more about this than I do can give me some pointers.

More about : esxi iscsi

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September 17, 2013 4:26:53 PM

Generally this should work alright so long as the two NICs that are directly connected to the other pair of NICs do not need any cross traffic communication. For example:

ESXi NIC A: 192.168.1.10
ESXi NIC B: 192.168.2.10

NAS NIC A: 192.168.1.20
NAS NIC B: 192.168.2.20

I don't know exactly if this is how you have your IP address configuration set up, but if these two NICs are paired up directly, then obviously they will not be able to route traffic between separate network ranges if needed. If you're using one pair of NICs directly connected for iSCSI traffic, and another pair of traffic connected directly for iSCSI traffic, they will individually have to be accessing different IP addresses to get to the Target Server IP address (in this case the two IP addresses of the NAS NIC.) This should work fine except in the case of failover, but again that would probably require setting up another host anyways which isn't in your current plans.
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