I have installed a dual port Fibre Channel card (Apple Fibre Channel Card PCI-E, also known as LSI2909XP-LC) in my Dell Server, and have connected cables from the card to two FC ports on my 3com Superstack3 3848 switch. But, how do I make a network connection in Windows that uses this card as a Network adapter? Someone told me i have to use Microsoft iSCSI Initiator, but if so, what would be the steps and settings to achieve this?
What I want at the end of the day a step by step on how to connect my Windows fileserver to the switch with 2 Fibre channel cables, and link aggregate them to give me a fat pipe for the 40 or so Gigabit client computers currently connected to the switch.
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I did ask 3com before I ventured down this route, and they said i could use the FC ports to host a server, not just uplink. But assuming I got it wrong, how would I then go about bridging a 1000Base-T network with a Fibre Channel one? And even if the switch FC ports were incompatible, how would I configure Windows to connect with an FC switch?
Thanks,
Alan. :)
Well, you would normally put a server on a Fibre Channel network so that it can access some type of storage. Is this what you are trying to do?
If so then this is possibly how you would have it setup.
Storage Device----FC switch----(Apple FC Card)[Dell Server](Ethernet NIC)----3COM switch----the rest of your LAN
So essentially your Dell server is the 'bridge' between your LAN and your SAN. To the Dell server, whatever storage you serve up to it will look like local storage, like any other hard drive you might connect to it. Once you mount it you can share it via Windows to the rest of your LAN.
Now, you also mentioned iSCSI and that is different than Fibre Channel. If you have a Storage Device that supports iSCSI then you don't need a Fibre Channel card or switch at all. You should be able to install the Microsoft iSCSI driver and just point to the IP address for the LUN on your storage device. Then it will show up as a local storage on your Dell server even though it's actually getting accessed via IP across your LAN.
Hope that clarifies things.
I have 2 Apple FC cards (total of 4 FC ports) in the Dell Server, with an Apple RAID (2TB RAID 0) connected directly to the Dell server with 2 FC cables, so it shows up as a local drive on the Dell Server. Right now the Dell Server connects to the switch via 1000Base-T, which is my bottleneck. I installed the 2 cards with a mind of using 2 for the RAID and 2 for the network connection. We had an EMC iSCSI devce (AX100i) which was way too slow. I'm already getting twice the read/write speed to the Apple RAIDDell Server with only 1 1000Base-T connection than I could get with the EMC box, which had 2 x 1000Base-T. But am testing with only one network client, and things are going to deteriorate rapidly when 40 clients connect, which is why I want to increase the Server's network connection to dual FC, link aggregrated to make one fat pipe.
From what I was told, Microsoft iSCSI Initiator can be used to essentially allow IP to communicate over the FC cards, but I'm not sure if this is correct, and don't want to introduce red herrings. If there is another way, or if iSCSI IS the way then I'd love to find the method.
Thanks for your comments. I hope this clarifies my scenario a little more.
I've not heard that the MS iSCSI initiator would allow communication over FC cards. I don't see how that would work. Your FC card is going to only connect to another FC device - storage or switch. The iSCSI initiator is not going to allow you to connect a FC card to a regular ethernet switch. No matter how fancy Microsoft gets with their iSCSI driver I don't see them converting FC frames to Ethernet frames.
What you should be doing is getting two Gigabit Ethernet connections and then aggregating those. The high overhead of Ethernet is bogging you down. If the 3Com supports port aggregation then all you need are NICs on the Dell server that supports it.
The card I used cannot be used as a network adapter in Windows, only in Solaris and Linux. I am replacing the card with one from small-tree communications, which is a 6 port card with 4 transceivers, giving me 4 LC connections which can be teamed in Windows, and link aggregated in the switch. This will give me 8Gbps full duplex of IP over FC, and the switch relays all those packets to the 1000Base-T also connected to the switch.
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by: photograffitiPosted on 2006-10-01 at 18:35:59ID: 17640450
Can you clarify something? You say that you put in a Fibre Channel card on your server but then you plugged that card into an ethernet switch? That card should should plug into a fibre channel switch, not a regular ethernet switch. Granted, the Superstack 3848 has a fiber port with an SFP LC-connector, but they are not compatible even if they fit together.