Nick,   Adding two more pNICs for iSCSI on each host will improve performance simply by reducing the oversubscription on the existing iSCSI pNICs.  However, I would ADD two NICs per host rather than reduce functionality elsewhere on the vSphere host.  In most vSphere configurations using IP-based storage, I recommend at least 8 x 1 Gb NICs on the host, on redundant hardware. On the R710/720 servers that have 4 onboard NICs, I add either one quad port or two dual port PCIe cards to meet the required 8 pNICs. For the 4 primary vSphere network services, use pNIC pairs from different locations (Onboard + PCIe)   vSphere Management - *I prefer separate ports and VLAN for management   vMotion  - *Use dedicated ports and VLAN for vMotion, as it is not encrypted   VM Networks (tagged guest VLANs)   Storage- iSCSI/NFS Of course, this changes with 10 Gb and converged networks, but in your scenario we are talking 1 Gb.  If you want to break out the iSCSI for the MD3200i onto separate NICs, add another PCIe card to each host rather than restrict the services above. My two cents. -Tim Antonowicz Dell TechCenter RockStar, vExpert
Hi I have an existing VMWare vSphere 4.1 infrastructure with 3 hosts and an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. Each host has 8 pnics of which 2 are dedicated to iSCSI. iSCSI traffic also runs on dedicated switches. We now have a spare Dell MD3200i SAN available which I would like to integrate into the existing storage network. I thought this would be a fairly painless process of just configuring all the ports on the MD for the existing iSCSI subnet, create some new VMkernel ports on each host and bind pnics to the relevant vmk ports. After much investigation this doesn’t appear to be the optimum config.  Dell state in their MD3200i deployment guide for vSphere 4.1 that: “It is recommended that you have different ports on different subnets due to throughput and pathing considerations…. Multiple subnets should be allocated by the number of array ports per controller. With the MD3200i you only get an active path to multiple ports on the same controller if they are on different subnets. Likewise, with VLANs, for multiple target ports on the same controller you only get an active path if the target ports are on different VLANs. Since the MD3220i has 4 ports per controller you get your best throughput with 4 subnets." Conversely the recommended config for the EqualLogic is all ports on the same subnet (which I believe is also generally the VMWare stance) I seem to have a number of options:  Does anyone have any experience of running an MD3200i or similar in a mixed SAN environment?  Thanks in advance for any advice. Cheers Nick
EqualLogic and MD3200i in the same environment