iSCSI SAN - Ethernet Switch Best Practices 1

[beatdown]

I'm about to setup my first SAN, and am looking for some advice on how to setup our ethernet switches.

The iSCSI SAN we just bought is a Dell MD3000i

We have a couple 48 port HP Procurve Gigabit switches, which are new, and have no configuration yet.

The switches will be replacing the 10/100 switches our 10 servers are currently hooked up to. Each server has 4 gigabit NIC ports.

So we want to use the two switches for redundancy, so each switch is connected to each server, and one of the controllers on the SAN.

Does anyone have any recommendations or "best practices" for setting this all up?

I imagine we'd want to have separate VLAN's - one for regular server/network traffic, and one for traffic between the servers and the SAN?

I'm a total noobie to the SAN world, so any advice is greatly appreciated...

Thanks!

 

[kmcferrin]

You will want separate VLANs for the iSCSI traffic.

You will want Jumbo Frames enabled for the iSCSI traffic.

You will also want to enable Multi-Path I/O (MPIO) on your servers to enable them to correctly detect the multiple paths to the storage AND properly fail over in the event that one path goes down. If the servers are Windows 2008 or 2008 R2 there is MPIO functionality that can be installed as a feature out of the box. If they are Windows 2003 then you may need to install a third party MPIO DSM, which should be available from your storage provider.

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