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 at 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