Hi ccbrownkc,

I haven't tried MD3000i's in the same cluster as PS arrays. I'm checking with PG and I will let you know what I find out. Dell PG may end up answering this thread directly.

Did you ever here back from PG?

Hi ccbrownkc,

The folks who responded back to me have not tested the PS4000e and MD3000i config that you've asked about.

They did provide some additional feedback:

The customer should use a separate VLAN for EQL. Also, use separate physical NICs, create virtual switches and VMkernel interfaces within the VLAN for EQL. And of course, follow EQL best practices such as enabling flow control, disabling STP on ports connecting to EQL and ESL, appropriately size any ISLs if present, etc…

The SMB BRC doc has instructions for using EQL with vSphere that may be helpful to the customer: VMware vSphere™ Reference Architecture for Small and Medium Business - http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/business~solutions~engineering-docs~en/Documents~VMware-vSphere-Reference-Architecture-SMB.pdf.aspx

Thanks KongY. I was hoping there would be a way around two new nics. I am using 1950's and do not have the room for additional nics unless I replace one of my dual ports with a quad port. Which would take quite a bit of reconfiguring. Thanks for your help.

As a short term solution, you *should* be able to create two new VMkernel ports on your existing vSwitches and put address them on a different subnet.
I.e. currently lets say your two VMkernel ports are 172.16.1.x and 172.16.2.x

The two new VMkernel ports could be 192.168.1.x

You are potentially creating a bottleneck since they are sharing NICs but if you're planning on migrating to the PS4000E this could work.

I would suggest running it by VMware support, just to make sure.

Long term the best solution is getting the quad port card.

-don

What I have done in the interim while I think about what I want to do is, just put it on the same subnet as the EQL ran the cabling into the LAG'd switches and am using MRU. It is actually working great. I believe it is faster that it was before? I do also have it partitioned a bit differently now though with raid configured across all 9 disk and a few VD's on one disk group. It is using separate controllers for each disk. If there is no strong reason to change this I may just leave it this way.

OK, as long as it works for you.

Don't be afraid to call customer support as well when you have questions or problems. They can look at it more closely and get a diag report from the PS4000 array as well. That provides allot of information about how the array and network are working.

-don

Will probably call shortly then! Just to be on the safe side.

Not sure if you still need this info, but I wrote a blog post about configuring both MD3200i and EqualLogic iSCSI SANs in a vSphere environment.  Hopefully this will be helpful to you.

"Mixed EqualLogic and MD3200i storage for vSphere" http://t.co/IEjakSLTLn