Hello all. I'm a sys admin for a medium-sized medical facility, and I'm trying to rebuild our Vsphere infrastructure correctly. I've kind of inherited a mess and I have a somewhat limited budget to get it fixed, and I also have no test environment (no time/funds for it). I'm hoping someone out there can answer some of my lingering questions. Let me explain...
We have 6 Vhosts running about 35 VMs across various builds of ESXi 4.0 and 4.1 that we've accumulated over time. Each of these is currently using a 1TB local datastore because we've never had centralized storage for our virtual infrastructure before. One of the reasons for that is that our applications require various storage protocols (iSCSI, FC, NFS and CIFS), etc. I've convinced the powers that be to purchase a NetApp FAS2240 with redundant controllers which covers all of our bases. However, I'm having a really difficult time figuring out how to create the physical and virtual networks necessary to get everything working using the equipment that I already have. I'll quickly list what I've got before I launch into my questions:
Hosts:
4 x Dell PowerEdge 2950's with 2 built-in and 2 additional NICs
2 x Dell PowerEdge R710's with 4 built-in NICS
Switches:
2 x Dell PowerConnect 2848 switches for LAN
2 x Dell PowerConnect 5424 switches for SAN
Storage:
NetApp FAS2240 w/ 4 Eth and 2 FC per controller
A few additional notes:
* Each host currently has only 4 NICs, but we are willing to spend the money to get to 6 if necessary.
* The 5424 switches are iSCSI optimized, but we've yet to see an example of how that benefits us if iSCSI traffic is segregated by VLAN.
* The FC fabric is a non-issue. We only have 1 server that requires FC, and it will directly connect to the NetApp. I'll be asking about NFS and iSCSI here.
*While I don't have a test network to play with, that has little to do with the SAN. Since we've never had a SAN before and everythign is working from the LAN now, I'm fairly comfortable testing some SAN stuff using the production equipment.
So our end goal is to have total redundancy for both LAN and SAN. Using the current hardware as is, here's a picture of how I see this working:
So from the picture, this is how I see things going: Each of my hosts will have 2 NICs for LAN and 2 for SAN. LAN is pretty straight forward, but the SAN network is the one troubling me. I've seen various posts in various places about VLAN tagging and sending different protocols over the same physical NICs/switchports, but I'm not 100% sure I can treat NFS and iSCSI this way on my Dell 5424's. In fact, I've had a Dell tech specifically advise me not to send tagged traffic but to VLAN off physical switchports for the 2 storage protocols. Here's a picture of how I would be doing that:
I'm okay with this setup, but it would require that I buy 2 additional NICs per host. Is this necessary? Also, given the 4 or 6 port setups, where should I place my management and Vmotion networks? I was thinking management on the LAN Vswitch and Vmotion on the NFS Vswitch. NFS is another problem. I have found TONS of info on setting up optimized, load balancing iSCSI storage networks, but I haven't found too much on doing the same with NFS. I know its possible, and I'd like to have the majority of my VMs running from an NFS datastore, but I'm just not finding the info...
I'm posting this in the Vmware, Dell, and NetApp forums in the hopes that I can get some additional guidance. I'll take whatever advice I can get with one exception – please don't suggest that I buy different switches, etc. My hardware budget is pretty much $0 after purchasing the NetApp, so I've got to make what I have work if there's any possible way.
Thanks to all!