I have seen this fail to work, as in dropped connections, BSOD'd VMs with a single host with no switch.  iSCSI traffic tends to be very bursty, that's when having the right switch pays you back. Re: 3750X those are good switches, there are some tuning parameters that need to be set.  Also to resolve a flowcontrol problem get the most current IOS firmware. For such a small group / server count, the 2960 stacked would be OK.  Possibly problems later if you need to scale this environment.  2960 lacks allot of buffer memory, so you might want to start out w/o Jumbo Frames, get everything into best practice and stable.  Then maybe later try enabling it.  3750X works fine with Jumbo and Flowcontrol enabled BTW. These choices are miles better than no switch.  Though 3750X's were pretty pricey the last time I looked.  Unless you have some already.  If you are sharing them with other traffic, which isn't optimal, but at the very least put all the ISCSI traffic on its own VLAN. 4948's are good choice.  Some higher end HP switches.  Stay away from the older ones, like the 2810, or 2824/48's.  They seem to be out there for cheap $$ but are designed for desktop GbE not iSCSI GbE.  Regards,  
Hello, Because of cost savings, we are integrating 1x Dell Equallogic ps6100x (2 controllers with each 4 ports) 3x dell poweredge r720 (each have 2 ports dedicated for SAN storage trafic) vSphere 5.5 (shared storage on the SAN) Without the use of SAN switches. Each host has dual direct connection (1 to each SAN controller) with iscsi software initiator. We have done this before with Dell MD3200i, which has also 2 controllers and 8 ports, so we are not expecting problems. But now that I read more about the Equallogic, I am starting to get uncertain whether this setup will work? I know this is not recommended but in this stage my only concern is that it will work (even with less performance). Can you please give me some advise on this?  Best Regards,  Joris  P.S. If this is surely NOT possible, what would be the best/low cost way of making this possible?  
Equallogic PS6100X: direct (dual) iscsi connections to 3 vmware ESX Hosts