How do you have this connected over the network? Is there only one switch or do you have two? My preferred setup (until someone shows me better) is to use 2 separate iscsi vmkernels per esxi host connected to 2 separate switches. The two switches are each on a different subnet/vlan and then connect to two ports each on the nexenta box. It may look like the network cards are on the same subnet, but I'm using a /26 to conserve addresses at this location and so there's 4 subnets: 1-62, 65-126, 129-190, 193-254 and I'm using the second two for my iSCSI network.

Your EE head is very similar to mine. I used the two on-board for igb0 and igb1 and then used 2 on the network card (in case one or the other controllers failed) for iscsi igb3 & igb5 and finally 2 for nexenta management igb2 and igb4. The odds in my setup of 3 esxi hosts saturating 4 gig links is highly unlikely and the ports are more there for reliability and the occasional burst of traffic.

Dear Jeff,

Your neat little description has kick started me on this. Thank you very much.

Can I ask why you need two nics for mgt of the nexenta box? Is that for redundancy?

The image nexenta_iscsi.png seems broken, any chance you could re-upload it?

Many thanks,

Alex

There's no need for two management nics, but I didn't want to unbalance the iSCSI nics by having 3 on one vlan and 2 on the other. Yes, more or less for redundancy to the management interface.

I just clicked on the link for the nexenta_iscsi.png and it loaded fine, but here it is again.