Dell N4032 switches

[flynnj57]

Hi All,

I recently purchased a pair of Dell N4032 24port 10GBe switches to connect our Nimble CS260 to 5 VMWare host servers. The Nimble has the 4 1GBe data connections per controller and servers are connecting via 4 1GBe links each. I recently tried to migrate to these new switches from our core Cisco Catalyst kit, but this brought about a lot of iSCSI errors on the VMWare hosts on boot up whilst trying to connect to volumes on the Nimble.

My question(s) is(are) this:

Has anyone used these switches successfully in conjunction with a Nimble SAN, if so what configuration did you use on the switches?

Do the switches need to be linked together, or should it work with them as fully separate units (I tried the odd/even networking option, but still had the errors)

[jjones130 · Accepted solution]

I have one of these that I use at my DR site, but honestly its a similar idea to any datacenter grade switch architecture. I would recommend that you run them as fully separate units but with port channeled uplinks to each other. That way you can have redundant interconnection between the two but still have them isolated to the point you can run a code upgrade with the system still running.

[flynnj57]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the reply. I think I managed to work out my particular issue though, the web GUI didn't seem to want to set the MTU values correctly on the ports. Had to do this via the command line in the end. For extra info, I have now stacked these switches using four of the ports and all seems to be fine, although I see your point regarding code upgrades. I'm marking your answer as correct. Cheers.