c3000 interconnect with HP P4500 iSCSI SAN, BL460cG6

[wacs]

Hi,

What interconnects would I need for an iSCSI SAN solution to run ESXi, would I need HBAs, the lists of hardware compatability issues gets very confusing in our mixed environment (windows and vmware).

[Niels Vejrup Pedersen]

Hello,

iSCSI are regular ethernet switches.

You have the options of Virtual Connect, Blade Networks and Cisco.

If you need a HBA or not depends on what you are going to use it for.

Regards,

[wacs]

Hi,

Thank you for the reply, according to the p4500 best practices, it seems there is a need for adaptive load balancing and mpio, should I be considering a pass through?

For ESX and windows mixed environments, do i just get additional physical 1gb e nic for the blades or do I get the qlogic iscsi hba?

[Niels Vejrup Pedersen]

Hi,

I would recommend taking a look at the Flex-10 Virtual Connect modules - since youre using the G6 blades, which comes with dual 10gig cards.

The current hardware adapters for iSCSI is only 1gig - and with flex-10 youre able to carve up the nics into 4 virtual nics.

Remember that the features of the multifunction nics are only available when running Windows - and NOT VMware ESX.


Be aware that the Flex-10 modules only support uplinks via CX4 or SFP+ modules.

Regards,

[wacs]

Hi,

We do not have 10gb infrastructure in place, will we be able to implement this with vc, and another 2 port NIC for 4 pNIC per blade for esx?

[Michel Tomrow]

Well bro to clarify your doubts there is no better place to go that in here: StarWindSoftware.com, search for Resources follow Technical Papers then click in StarWind iSCSI Target: Using StarWind with VMware ESX Server, here is everything you need to know.
Good luck

[wacs]

Great thanks for the link.