topic Re: setup Ontap with two Separate vlans for ISCSI in ONTAP Discussions

setup Ontap with two Separate vlans for ISCSI

miller — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 12:16:57 GMT

Hello,

As far as I know NetApp\Vmware best practice with iscsi protocol is setup Ontap with two Separate vlans for ISCSI

Iscsi A

Iscsi B

Do you have a document that states that?

Thank you.

Re: setup Ontap with two Separate vlans for ISCSI

SpindleNinja — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 14:08:16 GMT

https://library.netapp.com/ecm/ecm_download_file/ECMLP2495115

It is recommended that all SVMs in ISCSI configurations have a minimum of two LIF's per node in separate Ethernet networks for redundancy and MPIO across multiple paths.

doesn't necessarily have to be vlans, just two separate networks (switches)

Re: setup Ontap with two Separate vlans for ISCSI

TMACMD — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 14:20:56 GMT

Under VMware, one technique is to do this (using VLANs 133/134 for iSCSI):

1. Create a standard vSwtich (vSwitch 2) with both iSCSI vmnics (lets call them vmnic4 and vmnic5)

2. Create a port-group called iSCSI-A-133 in vSwitch 2 and insert a vmk

3. Create a port-group called iSCSI-B-134 in vSwitch 2 and insert a vmk

4. Configure the iSCSI-A-133 vmk teaming-failover to over-ride and make sure that vmnic4 is active and vmnic5 is unused.

5. Configure the iSCSI-B-133 vmk teaming-failover to over-ride and make sure that vmnic5 is active and vmnic4 is unused.

6. Go to the iSCSI software configuration and enable port-binding for those two vmks.

This allows for two interfaces inside a vswitch which allows vmware to think it has failover and you override that anyway with port-binding.

Re: setup Ontap with two Separate vlans for ISCSI

miller — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 17:34:26 GMT

thank you for your reply.

there is no documentaion for using 2 vlans at all?

Re: setup Ontap with two Separate vlans for ISCSI

SpindleNinja — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 18:40:58 GMT

Is this what you're looking for: https://docs.netapp.com/ontap-9/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.netapp.doc.dot-cm-sanconf%2FGUID-C5288E55-DAED-4050-84A2-71BF13BC6556.html

Re: setup Ontap with two Separate vlans for ISCSI

AllenJohnson — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 19:38:08 GMT

It's Best Practice to have seperate Fabrics for Block storage.
just like with FC traffic, it's not recommended to run iSCSI traffic on a single switch.
One way to accomplish this, is to physically seperate Fabric A and Fabric B ( FC or iSCSI) on seperate switches.
Another Best Practice is to use VLANs to seperate iSCSI traffic from other types of data traffic ( NFS / CIFs)