fas2020 with cifs & iscsi - vlan issue?

[michaelgodfrey]

Hello, I'm new to storage, and to networking.  so maybe there is an easy solution for this.

I have an active/active FAS2020 configuration.  I want to use it for VMWare ESX Servers with iSCSI LUNS, and also for CIFS.

My switches (srw2048) supports vlans, so i would like to vlan off my iscsi traffic.

But the FAS2020 only has two network ports.  i have them configured together in a virtual interface.  if i create a vlan for iscsi on the two ports, then the cifs traffic will be cut off.

would i have to remove the virtual interface and configure each port for a different vlan, then if so, how do i tell the fas to use one port for cifs, and one port for iscsi.

am i not understanding something?

any suggestions will be very helpful.

thanks!

[adamfox]

I suppose it depends on how you configure your network.  If you, indeed, have 2 separate vlans, one for iscsi traffic and one for CIFS, then you have 2 choices:

1. The simplest is to just have 1 interface on each vlan.  The traffic will automatically separate assuming the iscsi and cifs hosts are accessing the storage on the same local vlan/subnet.

2.  You can vif the 2 interfaces together, and then impelement vlan tagging on your switch and controllers.  On the storage side, this will create 2 interfaces vif-## where ## is your vlan #.  Then each interface is configured separately in ONTAP.  Of course you must configure your switch to do this as well.  This doesn't separate your traffic on the individual interfaces, per se, but potentially gives your a larger or more redudnant pipe for both protocols.

If you only have 1 subnet/Vlan, then it's tougher to make sure the traffic stays totally separate, but your best attempt will be to assign differnet IPs to each interfaces and then have the clients access the controller by the proper IP.  This can be done via DNS names, etc.

Hope this helps.