[CentOS] iSCSI best practices

Alan McKay

alan.mckay at gmail.com
Fri Dec 9 16:27:01 UTC 2011


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


-- 
“Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV”
         - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"



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