VMware - ESXi 5.0
H/W - Cisco UCS Blades
Stg - NetApp (iSCSI)
I just got iscsi Boot working for our ESXi hosts (running on Cisco UCS Blades). It works great but I have a "best practice" question now.
I see that VMware auto-creates a new vswitch named "iScsiBootvSwitch" and assigns the vnic used for iscsi boot .. ok, makes sense. The question I have is, should I use that same vswitch for VMFS Datastore traffic as well or create a dedicated vNIC in my UCS Profile which I can dedicate to another vSwitch? I assume it'll work if I use the iscsi vswitch for datastore traffic, I just didn't know if there were any downsides to doing this.
One other slight issue is now I also have two separate initiator groups on the NetApp - one for accessing the VMFS datastore LUNs and another for accessing the iscsi boot LUN. Looks like I may have to put the new initiators (from the ESXi hosts doing iscsi boot) into the existing initiator group and assign that igroup to the iscsi host LUN as well. NetApp does not allow an initiator to be in more than one initiator group, unfortunately.
TIA!