Memorise

Adding vSphere

P2000-with-vSphere

Initial iSCSI setup of the ESX/ESXi servers
Networking for the software initiator
Before SAN connectivity can be established a specific network configuration must be in place. To 
correctly enable connectivity, two VMkernel ports must be created and each configured to use a 
separate vmnic port. As a best practice, the VMkernel networks for iSCSI should be separate from the 
management and virtual networks used by virtual machines. If enough vmnic ports are available, it is 
preferred to have VMotion and VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) use a separate VMkernel network.
Network port configurations
At a minimum you will need four gigabit network ports in order to provided network separation and 
redundancy for your cluster. Two of the ports will be used for teaming on your VM Network, while the 
other two ports are used for iSCSI. While more ports are desirable in order to separate out FT and 
vMotion traffic, less than 4 ports is NOT recommended for use with the HP P2000 SAN as multipathing is 
not possible while maintaining a redundant VM Network.
Four network Ports
VMware vSphere 4 servers with four Gigabit network ports can perform better if you separate 
management and virtual machine traffic from iSCSI, VMotion, and FT traffic. As illustrated in Figure 2, 
vSphere 4 servers with four Gigabit network ports should be configured with two virtual switches, each 
comprising two Gigabit ports teamed together. If possible, use one port from each of two separate 
Gigabit adapters. For example, if using two onboard Gigabit adapters and a dual-port Ethernet card, 
team together port 0 from the onboard adapter and port 0 from the Ethernet card, and then team 
together port 1 from the onboard adapter and port 1 from the Ethernet card. This process provides 
protection from some bus or card failures

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Categorised as: Virtual Infrastructure, VMWare/ESX