Guest iSCSI on 10GBE

[#1]

I know in the 1 gig ethernet world the best practices for guest iSCSI was to have separate pNICs dedicated for the guest connected iSCSI volumes.  We're planning upgrade to 10GBE and I'm curious if that is necessary?  I planned to have 2 10GBE pNICs dedicated to iSCSI and they will, of course, be connected to separate 10GBE switches.

What's the recommendation once on 10GBE? 

[dbauder92 · Accepted solution]

The answer is it depends . . .  What are the IOPS requirements for your guests?  What are the throughput requirements for your guests?  What are the capabilities for your Nimble array?  Take the total of these numbers and that should tell you what you need to know.  I've run both VMware and Hyper-V hosts with 2 10GB iSCSI NICs and upwards of 40 guests per host with no dedicated guest vNICs and have not had any issues.  Also my Nimble array has 2 10GB NICs. Unless you have some significant storage throughput requirements you should be just fine.

[Valdereth]

I usually like to have at least 2 connections even for in-guest iSCSI.  This is more for the redundancy than throughput when you're talking 10GbE, I also like having a consistent number of connections displayed when you monitor the Nimble active connections list.  If you're working with Windows then Nimble Windows Toolkit will handle the multipathing and hotfix monitor, makes it easy!