iSCSI switch recommendations

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Evening. I'm currently in the final throws of speccing a new environment for a midrange joint venture contract we've been assigned.

I'm looking to head down the iSCSI route and am pretty sure I'll be using a pair of Cisco 3750s.

Anyone else got any recommendations in the switching department before I commit?

Ta
 
Not exactly iSCSI, but we are looking at virtualizing most of our environment, and are going for a HP MSA2000 series SAN on FC using all HP stuff, including the switches.

Just waiting for the VMWare sizing software to finish its reporting for a month and we'll have a better idea what we can stick on ESX :)
 
Baz said:
Not exactly iSCSI, but we are looking at virtualizing most of our environment, and are going for a HP MSA2000 series SAN on FC using all HP stuff, including the switches.

Just waiting for the VMWare sizing software to finish its reporting for a month and we'll have a better idea what we can stick on ESX :)
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The VMware capacity planner isn't much use imo. Last time i used it its server database was so far out of date you couldn't even buy the servers it was saying we needed to consolidate down to.
 
It's not as good as PowerRecon but it does eventually give you the processor/memory/io requirements albeit in obfuscated mode.

Take peak processor, divide by 2.4 (or whatever) and you get your processor core requirements, do the same with the others (memory will ultimately tell you how many hosts you need) then add an extra host for redundancy if you wish.
 
the_chicco said:
3750's are very good, especially the Stackwise technology. Although I do find them to be on the expensive side. HP's 3500yl range is very good and has a better forwarding rate than the 3750 series and is cheaper.
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Compared to a decent SAN it's not a huge deal though, we'd always pay the premium for Cisco kit but if you need to save the tiny bit extra you could do worse I suppose...

Though I will say our iSCSI vendor is picky about support for Cisco (particularly 3750s) as they apparently had a few issues in lab testing for failover scenarios. They tried to recommend a set of Dell switches (which were certified for iSCSI) but we said no and told them to approve the Ciscos for deployment or loose the business (oh the joys of being an important customer).
 
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we use 3750 as our basic switch. Expensive but they work, customers don't seem to have a problem paying for that extra cost. HP Procurves are just as good for our requirements but customers request that we change them to Cisco..

There's been a few times when we've needed to step up to the 6500 series but the 3750s have always done us proud.
 
Nortel 4500 series are excelent price and perfomance wise with 10G options and very fast stacking. I currently use the more expensive Nortel 5500 series switches which have bi-directional 40 Gbit stack links that are faster than the 3750's. This is with an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN and VMware ESX 3.5 setup.

Oh and they do resiliency very nicely for VMware environments :

http://www.nortel.com/solutions/security/collateral/nn123441.pdf
 
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NickK said:
we use 3750 as our basic switch. Expensive but they work, customers don't seem to have a problem paying for that extra cost. HP Procurves are just as good for our requirements but customers request that we change them to Cisco..

There's been a few times when we've needed to step up to the 6500 series but the 3750s have always done us proud.
Click to expand...

Be carefull of some of the HP switches with iSCSI as they can have issues enabling jumbo frames and flow control simultaneously.
 
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