OK, this should be an easy one, but pretty important that I get a very good explanation!
We recently ordered an EMC Clariion AX4 with an extra DAE loaded with all the disks we need. Because we are working on a budget, we could not afford Fiber Channel and have therefore opted to go with ISCSI. I am finding that ISCSI seems to be a little out of EMC's comfort level and I am getting answers that are conflicting with other answers...
We bought this SAN expecting to virtualize ALL of our network and move all backups, several databases, file storeage and eventually all of our VM VHD files over to the SAN. We would be consolidating about 15 physical servers into about 3 physical servers running 12+ VM's. This pretty much means that ALL of our current network traffic is going to be consolidated between the 3 physical machines and the SAN. Based on this, to keep from having any bottlenecks, we wanted to make sure that we had a good network connection between these devices. We worked with EMC who assured us that we didnt need to go into a Clariion CX4 with 6 network ports, as an AX4 would provide plenty of bandwidth with the 4, 1GB network connections it had. We then purchased a new very expensive server with 10, 1GB ports so that we could then bind/team some of these ports and dedicate traffic to some of our more recourse intensive applications/VMs.
Now the time has come, and we have been working with an EMC install tech to get this setup. First of all, we are using Hyper-V (as we already had MS Enterprise licensing, so our licensing is essentially free) and it seems that EMC doesnt really know a thing outside of VMWare, even though they claim to. Also we have found that to meet our budget they have left out PowerPath VE (VE= Virtual Environment) which means that we have no load balancing abilities on this SAN. This is very much an issue, as we fully disclosed to them what we expected to connect to this SAN, Hyper-V being a major part of this. Also, it is now showing that our tech, nor anyone I can now get ahold of, seems to know a thing about ISCSI.
Here is where the real problem is coming in:
I am told that the 4 NIC's on the back of the SAN are setup so that there are 2 ports going to SPA and 2 going to SPB. Also, these ports are only setup to be redundant of eachother for each SP, and each SP is really only setup to be redundant of eachother... this means that essentially at any point, we will only actually have a 1GB connection into this SAN. Now maybe I am underestimating a 1GB connection, however I have doubts that we can run 3+ databases, all of our file storeage, backups, VMM library and eventually VM's over a 1GB connection.
The reason I am here is to find out 2 things; 1) does what they are telling me sound correct? -I have my doubts, seeing how they told me differently during the sell, and that they dont seem too knowledgable on anything but Fiber, and 2) if this is the case, is this common to all SAN solutions? -We essentially thought of the 4 ports on the SAN as being teamed similar to an HP team or Linux Bind, which would allow us to offer up a 4 x 1GB team, giving us a 4GB connection.... Does any SAN work this way?
Thanks for any help you can provide!
