[Albertwt]

Hi All,

I'm about to deploy VMWare ESXi 3.5 on 2 servers which will be sharing the SAN using iSCSI (2x Gigabit Ethernet teaming cable).

1xSAN Specs:
Dell PowerVault MD3000
10x 300 GB SAS 15k rpm
2x Dual port Gigabit Ethernet NIC (4x in total)

2x Server Dell PowerEDGE 2950-III
2x Intel Quad Core E5410 (8core in total)
32 GB DDR-II 667 MHz
internal 4x 500 GB SATA 7200 rpm HDD (RAID 5) - I know it is slow for hosting the VMDKs
Internal USB slot on the motherboard (but no USB flashdisk ???)

in this case I'd like to simplify the diagram so that i can use 2xdirect patch cable connection to the SAN from each server and just leave the production line access shared cable to the unmanaged switch while those two pairs of the SAN-Servers running on it's own subnet
Please find the attached diagram.


and the last thing is, as I've got spare 1 TB from the internal RAID10 SATA Drive, any idea of what should i do with them apart from installing 32 MB ESXi ?

please let me know if this is does make sense and according to the best practice ?

thanks.
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[TravisB]

Hello,

While no expert by any means, I've just deployed a very similar setup:

3 Dell PE2950's with ESX 3.5 and 2 ETH ports dedicated to the iSCSI LAN.

1 Dell MD3000i with dual controllers (2 ETH ports and 1 management port per controller)

I used two switches between the servers and the array, though I suppose with only two servers, you may be able to forgo those switches.

I also found that VMware recommends using a single SAN subnet for the array connection instead of two separate ones.

One suggestion I offer is connecting one port from each server to one port on each iSCSI controller instead of both ports to a single controller. Otherwise if one controller fails, one of the servers will lose all connectivity to the array.

Regards,

-Travis

[Albertwt]

OK,

Thanks for the reply Travis, after reading through the net about using iSCSI SAN with ESXi, it seems that i also need to use vSwitch so that the separate SAN subnet can communicate with my client in LAN subnet.

so this is the diagram below, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Cheers,
Albert
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