I have posted this in the Celerra support forums, and it was suggested that I post it here as well, as the root source of my situation is that Microsoft does not support Exchange VM's on NFS datastores in VMWare.

Any help, options, and opinions welcomed....

I have an existing NX4, serving CIFS to Windows Clients (Significant use of CIFS in the environment) and NFS to a VMware environment. (about 30 guests across 3 hosts)

The current NX4 design has 2 cge ports configured with LACP supporting CIFS in one VLAN and the other 2 cge ports configured with LACP supporting NFS in a different VLAN. All switch ports are access ports. Jumbo Frames are enabled on the NFS ports.

I now have to introduce iSCSI into the picture, as the customer is virtualizing Exchange, and NFS datastores with Exchange VM's are not supported.

I have available network ports on the ESX side to dedicate to iSCSI traffic, so I can dedicate them to vmkernal ports, attach the ESXi software iSCSI initiator, enable MPIO etc etc, so no problem there.

My challenge is how to best introduce iSCSI networking from the NX4 side.

Ideally, I'd have (2) NX4 network ports not configured in a LACP to do end to end native MPIO. In order to do that, I would have to move my NFS traffic over to the CIFS LACP, change the CIFS switch ports to a TRUNK port, and have CIFS and NFS traffic traverse the same NX4 physical links.. Clearly, this will push the utilization if these network links up, and I am not sure of the impact of enabling JUMBO frames on these ports will have on CIFS traffic that is not using JUMBO frames. So not ideal

The other option for me would be to combine NFS and iSCSI traffic on the current NFS LACP connection. I would add an iSCSI target with multiple IP's, and still use VMWare native NMP on the ESX side, but it would be LACP on the NX4 side, so again not ideal.. But no JUMBO frame issues, and I think I would have a better balance of network.

Are there other options that I should consider? What would be the preferred option in your opinion?

Second question, on the NX4, iSCSI being served from the datamovers, with either approach, can the iSCSI connections reside in the same subnet or is it required that they be in seperate subnets or does it not matter?

Thanks

Jim