Network and Storage Protocols

VIF Setup on a 2040 Cluster

ucdavismbp
3,105 Views

I'm setting up a new FAS2040 cluster and I'm having a hard time deciding on the best networking configuration. The 2040 head has 12x 1TB SATA drives and I have a DS4243 with 12x 450GB SAS drives. My idea was to have controller A own all of the SATA drives and serve CIFS from that head. Controller B would own all of the SAS drives and serve NFS for vSphere 4.1. This gets me the most storage while still splitting duties between controllers.

I have 2 PowerConnect 2848 switches that all my servers connect to for redundancy (VMs using VDS)...this handles all of my production (read: LAN/Internet) data. I have two PowerConnect 5448 switches that I'll create a SAN (read: storage only) network on RFC1918 IP space. This network will only be available within that rack via those two switches.

Should both controllers have an active VIF on both of these networks (production and storage)? I'm not using iSCSI at the moment, but I'd generally use separate subnets for iSCSI multipathing...but this wouldn't work with NFS, right?

Does this seem right?

Controller A: VIF1 - e0a connected to Production switch 1, e0b connected to Production switch 2 using a multimode VIF

Controller A: VIF2 - e0c connected to SAN switch 1, e0d connected to SAN switch 2 using a multimode VIF (only required if taking over for B since A only serves CIFS data over the production network)

Controller B: VIF1 - same as vif1 above, but only required for takeover purposes?

Controller B: VIF2 e0c connected to SAN switch 1, e0d connected to SAN switch 2 using a multimode VIF (pumping out NFS data for the VM hosts)

Any insight would be helpful.

3 REPLIES 3

ucdavismbp
3,105 Views

Correction on the NFS VIF...it would have to be single mode since I'm using two switches for redundancy, correct?

radek_kubka
3,105 Views

it would have to be single mode since I'm using two switches for redundancy, correct?

If your switches support cross-stack LACP (like Cisco Etherchannel) then you are good to go with multimode vif. Otherwise it has to be single mode vif.

Regards,

Radek

aborzenkov
3,105 Views

To enable interface failover between controllers both of them must have access to the same VLANs. So yes, your setup looks reasonable.

Public