Afternoon all,
New to FreeNAS, or pretty much, I might have dabbled before but I'm certainly no SAN expert anyway.
I building a decent lab at home for VMWare VCP and beyond, and am looking to use FreeNAS as my storage backend. It's going to go on an HP DL380 G5 with likely around 32GB of RAM and a couple of processors. I'll be using the two onboard NICs but adding a more. I have a few 2 and 4 port NICs to spare if they're of benefit.
Question is, using this device as an iSCSI (better alternative?) storage backend for ESX, what do people find is the best way to connect up? I've read : http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_network.html#lacp-mpio-nfs-and-esxi that ends up essentially saying to use a single network connection, NFS doesn't understand MPIO, LACP doesn't like virtualisation etc. I can see a single 1GB link getting very quickly saturated with 4 or 5 ESX hosts.
What might be the best solution here? Storage traffic is to traverse the infrastructure on it's own network and dedicated 48-port switch. Plan was to aggregate maybe 4 or more GB ports up to the switch and then connect each host using a teamed pair (again, or better).
Looking for suggestions here, happy to learn and listen to suggestions, I'm certainly no SAN expert and I don't specialise in the network side so any advice welcome, even a starter to point me in the right direction :)
New to FreeNAS, or pretty much, I might have dabbled before but I'm certainly no SAN expert anyway.
I building a decent lab at home for VMWare VCP and beyond, and am looking to use FreeNAS as my storage backend. It's going to go on an HP DL380 G5 with likely around 32GB of RAM and a couple of processors. I'll be using the two onboard NICs but adding a more. I have a few 2 and 4 port NICs to spare if they're of benefit.
Question is, using this device as an iSCSI (better alternative?) storage backend for ESX, what do people find is the best way to connect up? I've read : http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_network.html#lacp-mpio-nfs-and-esxi that ends up essentially saying to use a single network connection, NFS doesn't understand MPIO, LACP doesn't like virtualisation etc. I can see a single 1GB link getting very quickly saturated with 4 or 5 ESX hosts.
What might be the best solution here? Storage traffic is to traverse the infrastructure on it's own network and dedicated 48-port switch. Plan was to aggregate maybe 4 or more GB ports up to the switch and then connect each host using a teamed pair (again, or better).
Looking for suggestions here, happy to learn and listen to suggestions, I'm certainly no SAN expert and I don't specialise in the network side so any advice welcome, even a starter to point me in the right direction :)