Hi there,

After some research I decided to go with open-e to build a redundant SAN for a small cloud environment.
I got a setup in mind, but am looking for confirmation if this setup makes sense and will work with open-e before I make the purchase.

Goal: get a fully redundant setup for a vsphere 5 environment.
Initial setup: 3 ESXi hosts and 2 SANs using iSCSI

First I wanted to connect the esxi hosts with 2 x 1 gbit connections to a switch and use MPIO.
But to make the replication between the 2 SANs work I would also need sufficient bandwidth.
Looking at some recent hardware, I've noticed that a setup with 10 GBe nics wouldn't cost too much more than decent (and more) gbit nics.
There are some supermicro servers that come with 10GBASE-T on board as well, and for the additional cards I would go for the Intel X540-T2 (10GBASE-T) nics.

Proposed wiring:
- Each SAN: 4 x 10 GBASE-T nic
- Each ESXi: 2 x 10 GBASE-T nic (+ 2 x gbit connection for the regular network connections)

Each ESXi would have 1 cable to the primary SAN and 1 cable to the secondary SAN.
And for the replication a direct connection between the 2 SAN's.

Some questions:

1) is the proposed wiring ok to make it fully redundant ?
2) I guess 10GBASE-T won't be a problem ? (I think I prefer this one over SFP+ and it is most likely future proof)
3) How should I setup the ping nodes for this setup ?
4) If I want to get extra ESXi servers I would need to add an additional 10GBASE-T nic in each SAN ... is there a limit on the number of NIC's I can use in open-e ?


Thanks !
Nick