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fiber VNX or ISCSI VNX

Hi all

we are going to use vmware vsphere 6.0 for everything in our environment

and we already have VNX 5400 and our VNX work now with fiber connection

the question is my manager want to change and he want to use ISCSI

so i need advice is really now ISCSI better because the Ethernet switches has 10 G speed

personally i had from long time ago problems to fix and troubleshot iscsi storage with Solaris servers so from that time i don't like Iscsi

now i want real good advice and especially for v sphere it is better to use fiber or ISCSI and why ?

thanks
sword

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

Fibre Channel was king for many years before the introduction of iSCSI, but iSCSI has been a part of VMware vSphere fabric for many years now, since ESXi/ESX 3.0.

Fibre was considered the rolls royce of storage, followed by iSCSI, and NFS.... things have changed over the years.

iSCSI and VMware ESXi/ESX was a marriage made in heaven, and brought cheaper, inexpensive shared storage solutions, which were less complex, and costly than having to have a dedicated fibre fabric for fibre channel storage.

iSCSI via 1GBe networking has been fine for most, but now with 10GBe networking a commodity, has started to replace Fibre Channel.

The question you should be asking, is what performance, and IOPS do you require, are you going to be using a Hybrid Flash, or Flash Array, which needs the performance of 10GBe, or Fibre Channel.

iSCSI and Solaris, was an emerging technology....

sword12

ASKER

So according to your advice

ISCSI with ESXI will provide stable good performance with no headache for troubleshooting and no need any more to have dedicated fiber fabric .

we will use in our vnx5400 one pool mixed SAS with SSD disks with auto tiring enabled .

and we will replace the fiber interfaces with 10 G Ethernet and provide ISCSI and NFS for our ESXI servers

so you think this good idea

and if you want to compare this solution with VSAN using the servers local disks which one you will recommend ? vnx5400 with ISCSI or VSAN using the servers local disks ?

thanks again
sword

SOLUTION

Carlos Ijalba

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

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