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I have a HP ProCurve 1810G-8 which I currently use as a normal switch between 3 servers and a firewall.

2 of the servers are ESXi hosts, and one is a Nexentastor box with 2 iSCSI target LUNs.

As the iSCSI traffic is on the same LAN as all other traffic, I would like to switch this to use a SAN for iSCSI traffic and the LAN for all other traffic.

The Nexentastor box only has 2 NICs, and as such, with a physical arrangement, I presume that one must be plugged into the SAN VLAN and one on the LAN VLAN ports of the switch.

Is there a way to have multiple VLANs over the same port?

e.g. the Nexentsator box has 2 NICs, both plugged into the switch, both ports with access to both of the VLANs?

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    Why would the Nexentastor need to be plugged into the LAN? Typically the SAN network is isolated form the production network. The servers would typically need two NIC's, one for the production network and one for the SAN network. In which case you would need two VLAN's, one for the production network and one for the SAN network, both having access ports as members, no trunk port required.
    – joeqwerty
    Nov 14, 2012 at 1:21
  • The Nexentastor device is on the LAN for the WebUI. The Nexentastor box does have 2 NICs though, so one can be LAN and one SAN.
    – Darbio
    Nov 14, 2012 at 1:22
  • You would access the WebUi from one of the servers since they'll be connected to the SAN network. If you don't want to access the WebUI from the server you can access it from a dual-homed management station.
    – joeqwerty
    Nov 14, 2012 at 1:25

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Yes it is possible, you just need to set up the port as a "trunk port". You can also add ACLs to permit only those two VLANs.

You will also need to set up appropriate VLANs on your ESXi (In the virtual switch configuration, you'll have to set up VLANs for your virtual machines, for all of them to be in the "lan" VLAN).

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Honestly, using VST for the sole purpose of having access to the WebUI on the Nexentastor isn't the right way to go about this, IMO. You're adding unneccessary complexity for no real benefit. If your desire is to be able to access the WebUI of the Nexentastor you should be able to easily do that via the iSCSI network from a dual-homed management station. Personally I think EST is what's called for here.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1003806

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Why is there a problem with having one NexentaStor port in the storage vlan and one in the normal data network vlan? That is a perfectly-valid setup.

For a two-port Nexenta system, I'd probably plan on acquiring another 2 or 4-port network card...

But if you're stuck with what you have, you can simply get away with creating two vlans on your ProCurve 1800 switch:

  • One vlan for general network traffic (including virtual machine networking, Nexenta management, etc.)
  • Another vlan for storage-specific traffic.

You did not specify how many network interfaces were present in your VMWare host servers, but I'm assuming 2 or more. Dedicate one to iSCSI traffic on each and assign those ports to the storage vlan.

With the small setup you describe, MPIO and switch redundancy don't sound like they're in the plans, so just go with this arrangement.

I would not advise trunking your ports with the Nexenta setup you have.

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  • Does only having one port available on the SAN vLAN for iSCSI reduce the bandwidth for the EXSi boxes which are using iSCSI?
    – Darbio
    Nov 14, 2012 at 3:35
  • Two storage ports won't do anything unless you have multipath configured. I don't think storage network ports will be your bottleneck at this point. Again, if you need more ports, buy an additional network card.
    – ewwhite
    Nov 14, 2012 at 3:46

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