Hi All,

I'm struggling with this for several weeks now, and hope to find some usefull advice in here.

This is our equipment :
- MD3000i with dual storage processor
- 2 x Powerconnect 2716 switches
- 2 hosts with 3x dual Gigabit Nic (of which 2 (out of 6 connections) are dedicated used for iscsi)
- VMWare esx 3.5 with software iscsi initiator on the Host (not on the vm guests)

I followed the instructions as found at :
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/esx_storage_deployment_guide_v1.pdf
And also the following discussion at this site helped me a lot :
http://www.delltechcenter.com/thread/1267618/MD3000i+and+ISCSI+Network+IP+Ranges

Here 's what I discovered untill now :
1) The one-subnet setup doesn't work that good !
- in VM : one virtual switch (with service console and vmkernel) for iscsi. Two physical NIC's attached in NIC Teaming (default settings)
- Since my switches do not support "Stacking" or "ISL" I first decided not to connect them to each other.

As a result :
- only 2 of the 4 available network-paths were 'alive'
- if the active nic or active switch went down, no failover to nic 2 was done ... until a manual rescan of the storage adapters was initiated

Connecting the two switches (with a standard crosscable) solved this "a bit", but :
- all connections were initiated by the first nic (no load balancing over the 2 nics)
- more often than not, the most NON-optimal 'data paths' were used. I mean : [nic1-switch1-switch2-san] while it could have been [nic1-switch1-san]
- And worst of all : in case of a failure of the interswitch-link (which can't be monitored) a subsequent failure of nic1 or switch1 would cause a failure of the data-connection (and a manual rescan to fail-over to nic2)

continued in next post ...