2910al's L2 redndancy used as a dedicated iSCSI switch

[groque]

hi all,

I am thinking of using two 2910al's as dedicated iSCSI switches.

I want to have two for layer 2 network redundancy my question is how would I configure network redundancy using two layer 2 switches without using trunk links.

I can't quite picture how I would connect a server for to two separate L2 switches for redundancy and scalability. Does NIC teaming solve this problem.

Thanks

[Cajuntank MS]

You don't. What I mean is, if you want redundancy in iSCSI, you will implement these switches completely independant of each other. They will each plug into the iSCSI SAN's ethernet ports, each of your hosts (assuming you have dual NICS) will plug a NIC port into each switch (NO TEAMING!), and you will take advantage of something called Microsoft MPIO Multipathing Support for iSCSI. Note: Your target SAN might need some option enabled to support Microsoft's MPIO; otherwise, your SAN might support MPIO through some proprietary DSM (driver-specific module). Your iSCSI SAN documentation should provide you with this connectivity info or you can google Microsoft MPIO and find some step by step guides showing what to do from the OS point of view; but remember, there's probably something that will have to be set on the iSCSI SAN itself.

Hope that helps.