Colocation to Virtualization

Just wanted to put this information out there.  Where I work, our ESX cluster will have 10 NICS (6 currently on 2 VLANS) and 3 different VLANs segmenting off different traffic.  The VMkernel Port is needed to utilize the following

• ISCSI
• NFS/NAS
• VMotion

This information is provided when going through “Add Networking” under the configuration tab in ESX3.x.

VMkernel Add Networking

In ESX 3.x VMware has the ability to create a VMkernel Port on each vSwitch.  So far, we have had no luck utilizing NFS or software ISCSI through two different VMkernel Ports.  Example:

There is a NAS on both a private VLAN and the normal LAN network.  Each goes through a different vSwitch.  After adding a VMkernel Port on both vSwitches, NFS and ISCSI worked fine to the first defined connection.  After VMware first connects to a server on either subnet, in this example 172.0.1.2, the next connection to 172.0.2.1 will fail. It will fail no matter if trying to connect through the other vSwitch using the same protocol (NFS) or ISCSI.  Whichever connection is established first, VMWare seems not to be able to route through the other VMkernel Port

Dual NFS Mount Errors

Below shows a vSwitch configuration with a VMkernel Port

vSwitch With VMkernel

Note: I am unsure if this would be an issue when using an hardware ISCSI (ISCSI card). As far as NFS is concerned, I do not have a work around for this currently.  If you will need to mount NFS shares from two different sources, through different vSwitches, better find the answer to this problem first.  I hope that ESX 4 solves this issue.