Network Setup help

[Five_Star]

Hi,

Since a fire in our office forced us to move out and replace a lot of our kit i've been thinking about how best to recreate the network once the new kit arrives.

We've got an iSCSI SAN and server setup on order and Dell are also supplying the new switches. 2x 24 port gigabit - PowerConnect 2724. Does anybody knows if they are ok or not? I'm just downloading the documentation for them now.

I've been learning about setting up iSCSI running over the LAN by setting up a VLAN to segregate the traffic, is this the recommended way to do this?

The confusion comes from having two of these 2724 switches. I assume we can run them clustered so they provide some level of redundancy and load balancing.

Is this something that the Dell switches can do? (I guess this is really for me to discover)
More imprtantly is this the correct way about setting these things up?

In the diagram below the SAN and Server are connected to both switches and the switches are connected to each other on the VLAN.

The office PCs are connected to a single switch, but half to one and the rest to the other. Do i need to provide another physical link between the two switches?

Additionally we have a single connection from one of the switches to the ASA firewall and a link to our PoE Switch so the phones can work.

I hope this is a reasonable description of what I’m hoping to achieve, thanks.

 

[Shaz]sigh[]

Hi,

Firstly it's recommended to keep iSCSI and LAN traffic seperate. General reason is guaranteed bandwidth for iSCSI.

If this is not possible, you'd create VLANs for relevant traffic. Doing this you can apply CoS for your iSCSI/IPT etc.

I don't know anything specific about those Dell switches so can't help too much... however, the way you've set that up will work well using MST. Using this, you could load balance each VLAN over both switches. Unless they are able to be stacked, you'll be trunking physical Ethernet between them.

Ensure that there's adequate bandwidth between each switch to guarantee throughput for servers/clients to the wan/lan should any paths fail.

I would also, looking at your diagram, buy a cheap access switch for your clients.

 

[VeNT]

arn't dell switches just rebadged HP? (not sure where I heard this)

 

[Five_Star]

Hi, thanks for the replies.

I should amend the diagram to separate the iSCSI and the rest of the network. It seems we are going to be allowed to get two switches to dedicate to the data.

On the details of these switches, should I press for alternative hardware, be it from HP or even CISCO? If so I would love to hear peoples recommendations and if possible, cost?