How do you configure seperate network for ISCSI

Initiator (iSCSI, FCoE, AoE, iSER and NVMe over Fabrics), iSCSI accelerator and RAM disk

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getahost
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Joined: Thu Feb 09, 2012 7:02 am

Thu Feb 09, 2012 7:11 am

I have 3 Windows Servers and all have Windows server 2008 R2. My SAN has the free version of Starwind and I am currently on a 192.168.1.1 network and everything works flawlessly. It is recommended to move the SAN traffic to a different network (Vlan) or switch. I bought a new unmanaged Gigabit swith and here is how I hooked it up.

All servers have 2 NICs
NIC 1 on each server
Main Internet Router 192.168.1.1
Server 1 192.168.1.3
Server 2 192.168.1.4
Server 3 192.168.1.5 Starwind SAN

NIC 2 is now ready to get hooked up.
I have connected the 2nd nic on each server to the new Switch. What in the world do I do next? How do I make sure that only SAN traffic passes on this new network? What ip address do I give it? Does the 2nd network need to see the internet? I want this to only be a private internal SAN network so what do I do? Any help is appreciated. Thank you and looking forward to a reply with some ideas and suggestions.

Neil Ghuman
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Aitor_Ibarra
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Location: London

Thu Feb 09, 2012 5:32 pm

1) give the nics ip addresses on a different network. E.g. your main network is 192.168.1.0 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. Your iSCSI network could be 192.168.2.0 with same subnet mask, or you could do IPs from another non routable range like 10.x.x.x. You might want to read up on ip addressing and subnets etc.

2) The iSCSI network has no need of a default gateway. Your Starwind box may need access to the internet - e.g. for windows updates, if so keep it connected to your existing 192.168.1.0 network with gateway of 192.168.1.1.

3) On the initiator side, you need to make sure that iSCSI traffic is on your new network and not your old one. The simplest way to do this is (on MS iSCSI, assuming MPIO is enabled) is to remove the existing connections from the Favourite targets tab, and then add new connections. When you add a new connection, enable multipath, click the advanced button and choose the right initiator ip address from the drop down. The "old" connections will be forgotten when you reboot the initiator, until then both the old and new connection will be used - you can change this be disconnecting the old session and/or changing the MPIO settings.

4) To verify all is well, generate some iscsi traffic and look at network usage on each NIC in task manager.
getahost
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Feb 09, 2012 7:02 am

Thu Feb 09, 2012 5:41 pm

Thanks for the information. We are not using MS ISCSI or MPIO yet. We are testing the free version and are using the Starwind ISCSI connector. According to the Starwind website, it is 10 times better and it is very fast too. Can you give me some instructions on how to use the Starwind ISCI connector to make this possible.

Thank you and awaiting your reply.
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Aitor_Ibarra
Posts: 163
Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2008 1:22 pm
Location: London

Thu Feb 09, 2012 6:58 pm

You mean Starport? Sorry, I have no experience of using it (except that some Starwind - to - Starwind functions have depended on it). I've only ever used Microsoft failover clusters as clients for Starwind (kind of the reason why I needed a SAN in the first place), and Microsoft only support their own initiator in this scenario, so I've stuck with it.
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Anatoly (staff)
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Mon Feb 13, 2012 11:17 am

Well actually steps provided by Aitor looks pretty OK. I need to edit point 3 of his plan actualy: we haven`t got Multipath in our iSCSI initiator, so the best way to accomplish your plan is to disconnect from all the devices and then connect to the new ones taht you have after first step of Aitors plan.
Best regards,
Anatoly Vilchinsky
Global Engineering and Support Manager
www.starwind.com
av@starwind.com
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