Help needed with network setup

Hi, I am confused about how to setup our new open-e iscsi box. ANy help pointers would be appreciated, i have read alot of help files online but none really cover what i am trying to do.

I have two esx3.5 servers each with four spare nics.

One open-e dssv6 iscsi with 5 spare nics.

Two storage switches.


What i would like to do is have four nics on the SAN 802.3ad bonded into two nics.

each bonded nic connected to a different switch.

Then each vm with one nic connected to each switch to make it MPIO config.

Will this work and allow me to loose any nic or a switch and keep running? How should i address these cards and bonds? Or am i going about it all wrong?

Hi there,

This is purely my opinion, but i've yet to see bonding REALLY help improve performance, unless you're already using the full bandwidth of a single NIC at which point it starts to pay off.

I've just got MPIO up and running and it's really quite easy to setup. Now bonding is required for MPIO to function! There is a good How to here: http://www.open-e.com/download/libra...t_file/get/84/

In my setup i've done away with storage switch(s) and cabled two spare NICS of my DSSv6 in to 2 spare NICS of my ESXi box. DSS automatically works when it comes to MPIO, the majority of the configuration work is done in ESXi and any VM's that mount iSCSI LUNs.

There is no reason why you can't scale this up to your requirements of two ESXi servers and a single DSS, without having to use any switches, but still benefiting form the increased bandwidth and performance of MPIO.

You could have 2 NICs of your DSS dedicated to each ESXi server and still have a spare NIC for "out of band" management - perhaps useful for replication in the future.

I hope this help,

TFZ

Thanks for the reply, i have got this sorted now. It esx3.5 does not support MPIO. I am upgrading to vsphere and then adding the mpio setup.