VSA with more than one Virtual NIC

[Andres M]

I'd like to implement the following configuration which is something that I have done with other iSCSI vendors, the user guide states than "more than 2 NICs are not supported"
jut double checking with the real gurus :)

The ESX servers are going to only run the VSA, no other type of VMs will be created.

ESX 1 with 4 pNICs

VSA 1 with two vNICs

vNIC # 1: IP subnet 1 --> vSwitch 1: pNIC 1, 3
vNIC # 2 : IP subnet 2 --> vSwitch 2: pNIC 2, 4


ESX 2 with 4 pNICs

VSA 2 with two vNICs

vNIC # 1: IP subnet 1 --> vSwitch 1: pNIC 1, 3
vNIC # 2 : IP subnet 2 --> vSwitch 2: pNIC 2, 4

2 VIPs:

VIP # 1 with ESX 1 IP subnet 1 and ESX 2 IP subnet 1

VIP # 2 with ESX 1 IP subnet 2 and ESX 2 IP subnet 2

Does it make sense ?

Thanks a lot!

Andres

[Niels Vejrup Pedersen]

Hello,

You can do that.

The VSA only supports 2 vNICs.

I did a similar configuration in my lab.

I understand why you want to do that, to maximize the throughput on the pNICs.

Hardware vendors do this due to the way their controller failover is implemented ( e.g. msa 2012i)

Regards

[Gauche]

Your network configuration made sense to me until you say 2 VIPs.
What are you trying to accomplish with using two VIPs in this case?

[Andres M]

I'm going to need to VIPs per HP documentation: VSA NIC bonding is not supported in the VSA and VIPs cannot be in the same subnet, I always have done two subnets with other vendors to balance the traffic and facilitate the failover when the iSCSI SW does not have stacking capabilities: it gives you more control. I highly recommend evrybody to read this blogs post from the EMC iSCSI guru Chad about this topic.

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/a-multivendor-post-to-help-our-mutual-iscsi-customers-using-vmware.html

Thanks

Andres