Seperating ISCSI Traffic

[vapor]

I want to seperate my iscsi traffic from regular network. I have four nics in each host. I wanted to team the two sets of nics and use one team for iscsi on a seperate phisical network and one team for my VM network.

I am using the software HBA adapter in ESXi 4 would buying HBA adapters instead of using Nics change anything?

My understanding is that the processing for iscsi is being done by my processor and that with HBA NIC cards the iscsi processing would be done on the card instead?

What are the requirments that ESXI 4 needs on a network to operate?

If I connect a host on a switch with no router and staticly assign IP addresses the staticly assign ip address on storage, will I be able to connect using the iscsi software HBA adapter?

I have four servers servicing 120 clients, I am using gigabit nics to my gigabit iscsi storage with gigabit switches.

All my clients are connected to a 10/100 switch with one uplink to my gigabit switch. How can I see if I am having I/O issues ? How can I tell if the VM's are not getting the throughput they need of the network?

Sorry for so many questions I am trying to create a redundant network and isolate my iSCSI traffic to another network, while providing my self redundancy by adding a second switch and another path to my iSCSI NAS.

[idle-jam]

1) modern card will have iscsi offloan technology like TOE in built, and i will not really care much as the CPU consumed is very minimal and today's CPU is very very fast with multicores.

2) yes, the iscsi range will be a single between the hosts and the iSCSI SAN, you do no need any router to route it to different segment. since it's an island or isolated you can come out with any range that you're happy with

3) you could look into performande tab and look at the traffic flow. see if it's saturated or not. like a constant line

[Josh26]

A) Nothing at all. Nearly every attempt to use hardware iSCSI has resulted in a post on this forum about how it was no better than software iSCSI, but less reliable. In short, use VMWare's built in iSCSI.

b) You will need a separate IP range for your iSCSI switch. A quality switch that supports wirespeed gigabit ports, jumbo frames, flow control, and has a decent buffer size is all related to this.

Do NOT team your two iSCSI NICs. You should set up two separate interfaces and use multipathing for a supported environment.

c) It's almost certain that any switch old enough to be 10/100 will fail to keep up with modern network loads.