IP Addressing/Cabling Recommendation for Native SAN

JTDC · Sat Nov 24, 2012 7:42 pm

I have two identical servers for Native SAN for Hyper-V deployment, each with a two port 10G nic, a four port 1G nic, and a two port 1G nic built into the motherboard. What would be the most effective way to use the two 10G ports to get maximum perfomance? I understand I have to connect the two servers for ISCSI, sync, and heartbeat traffic. Apart from that I was thinking that the four port card would be best for connecting to my LAN. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Mon Nov 26, 2012 4:10 pm

Hi,
Please find the recommended topology below:

: NS for H-V.png (128.87 KiB) Viewed 10063 times

As you can see 1 pair of 1Gigs is not necessary here.
Please notice, Hyper-V traffic link can be used to Heartbeat. For greater fault tolerance, you can increase the number of switches to two.

JTDC · Tue Nov 27, 2012 5:09 pm

Just what I needed. Thanks! I also wanted to make sure that there would not be any real benefit to putting the heartbeat and iSCSI traffic on a 10G port if I were to add another 10G adapter. It seems that these are fairly light in terms of activity. Is that right?

Wed Nov 28, 2012 10:56 am

Heartbeat does not really need 10 GbE - it's only active if the synchronization channel fails.
iSCSI traffic should be put on 10 GbE for higher final throughput. Keep in mind the rule of thumb - sync channel throughput has to be same or bigger than total client iSCSI connections throughput. E.g. if you have a 10 GbE connection to the client server from each StarWind machine - Synchronization channel has to be 2x 10 GbE