The big issue in corporate land would be security. Yes you can do vlans and/or encrypt it, but that is going to add overhead, either management (*people) or CPU, both of which take away from any speed advantages you might get.
On Fri, 9 Dec 2011, Alan McKay wrote:
Hey folks,
I had some general questions and when reading through the list archives I came across an iSCSI discussion back in February where a couple of individuals were going back and forth about drafting up a "best practices" doc and putting it into a wiki. Did that ever happen? And if so, where is it?
Now my questions : We are not using iSCIS yet at work but I see a few places where it would be useful e.g. a number of heavy-use NFS mounts (from my ZFS appliance) that I believe would be slightly more efficient if I converted them to iSCSI. I also want to introduce some virtual machines which I think would work out best if I created iSCSI drives for them back on my Oracle/Sun ZFS appliance.
I mentioned iSCSI to the guy whose work I have taken over here so that he can concentrate on his real job, and when I mentioned that we should have a separate switch so that all iSCSI traffic is on it's own switch, he balked and said something like "it is a switched network, it should not matter". But that does not sit right with me - the little bit I've read about iSCSI in the past always stresses that you should have it on its own network.
So 2 questions :
- how important is it to have it on its own network?
- is it OK to use an unmanaged switch (as long as it is Gigabit), or are
there some features of a managed switch that are desirable/required with iSCSI?
thanks, -Alan
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE jim@rossberry.com http://www.rossberry.net "Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." Thomas Paine