Hi Thanks for the reply and apprecaite your feedback. Further to your comments, I have the following comments and questions. Im still a little unsure of the design for the Filers from the network configuration side. I spoke with the network guys and they have advised that the switches we use support LACP, trunking, VLAN's without an issue. To give you a little more idea as to what we are doing, a summary is as follows: We have the following as part of the infrastructure solution: 1 x IBM BladeCenter with 8 gigabit ethernet ports per blade server 8 x L2 Ethernet Switches in the Blade Chassis (IBM Server Connectivity Module) 1 x FAS204 Dual Controller with 4 gigabit ethernet ports per controller We are looking to use NFS shares primarily for our Citrix XenServer Storage Repositories, CIFS for general Windows shares & home directories, and iSCSI for our Microsoft Exchange environment. Filer 1 (Controller A) will host the iSCSI LUN and Filer 2 (Controller B) will host the NFS and CIFS shares. At the moment, as far as I understand, my thoughts around the network design are as follows: e0a - Single Interface for CIFS & Management e0b & e0c - MultiMode VIF for NFS traffic only e0d - Single Interace for iSCSI traffic only or VIF0 (e0a & e0b) - MultiMode VIF for Management and NFS VIF1 (e0c & e0d - MultiMode VIF for ISCSI and CIFS traffic or VIF0 (e0a, e0b, e0c, e0d) - Multimode VIF to support all protocols Typically, I would split the iSCSI traffic from the NFS and CIFS due to its chatty nature or does it not matter with the NetApp filers? Based on the above information, what would be the best way to design the networking. It could be either through multiple VIF's, sVIFS, VLAN's, Alias etc etc. Can we load balance traffic between both filers or are they still considered 2 seperate filers with seperate networking? Should the exact same network configuration be implemented on both Filers (in case of partner takeover), even though we wont be hosting any CIFS or NFS shares on Filer 1 at this stage or should we configure each Filers's network according to its functional role and the protocols that it will be serving? Do you recommend turning on Jumbo Frames for iSCSI and/or NFS? If you have has any experience with this same or similar solution (can be VMWare ESX or Citrix XenServer) or can assist with any part of it, it will be greatly appreciated. If it easier to illustrate using a diagram with a sample set of IP addresses for segregating the storage network from the production network, that would be very useful. Thanking you in advance. ... View more