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ESXi - iSCSI setup

T

technobot

n00b
Joined
Aug 16, 2013
Messages
12
Hello, all. This is my first build so please forgive the noobery.

The ESXi box I built is for lab/test purposes. I'm playing with AD, vCenter, SQL, and some products from work. Also used for playing around in different OS's.

The core switch is a CISCO SG300-10. I've setup VLANs for the management network, the VM network, and IPMI.

My FreeNAS box was designated to be an iSCSI target with a 500GB file extent for VM templates.

I put an Intel PRO 1000 PT Dual Port adapter in both ESXi and the FreeNAS box. I connected all four ports to the switch with two VLANs. I did this because I wanted to try out the multipath round robin for iSCSI. The ESXi and FreeNAS ports were bonded to similar VLANs, i.e. NIC A - NIC A on VLAN 4, NIC B - NIC B on VLAN 5.

This worked. Multipathing seemed to work fine, and a cable unplug confirmed failover worked as well.

Having said all of this, this setup maxed out the ports on my switch. Since I don't have a second host, I decided to plug the ESXi dual ports DIRECTLY into the FreeNAS dual ports, and free up four ports on the switch. As expected, this works perfectly fine.

Now (finally) onto my question. I don't intend (at this time) to share the iSCSI with another host, and the wife will prevent another host from appearing for awhile. With this in mind... am I doing it "right"? Is this a crackhead way to set it up?

Like I said, it works either way, but I'm hoping someone (anyone) who knows more about this than I do can give me some pointers.
 
I don't think I know more than you, but I'm running a similar setup. Instead of FreeNAS, I'm running ZFS on Ubuntu and have multiple iSCSI targets set up, one of which is to boot ESXi and another for the ESXi datastore. I also have a few other boxen that are booting on different targets (my rack is essentially diskless other than the storage box). If you were to add more hosts in the future, I would assume that FreeNAS would allow you to add additional iSCSI targets to it for the next host.
 
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