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1. Introduction
The Dell™ PowerVault™ MD3000i storage solution consists of a standard or high availability
configuration. The standard model has a single controller with two 1GbE ports. It can be deployed
to support up to 16 hosts non-redundantly. The high availability model has dual controllers with
two 1GbE ports per controller for a total of four 1GbE ports. The dual controller option can
connect up to 16 fully redundant hosts. This document provides instructions to setup the
MD3000i iSCSI storage solution for usage with VMware® ESX Server™ software.
The Dell PowerVault MD3000i iSCSI storage array contains four Ethernet ports through which the
VD can be accessed affording both redundancy and availability of data. Provisioning of storage
on servers in a VM environment is a multiple step process starting with definition of the server
names for host access. The iSCSI connection is then established from the storage subsystem,
and after detection and configuration is established as a two way link with the associated ESX
server(s), completing the iSCSI communication subsystem. The final step allocates the detected
storage to the individual virtual machines (VM’s), where all or part of the configured storage can
be assigned to individual VM’s.
2. Architectural Setup
The following figure illustrates a typical high availability setup for using the MD3000i in an ESX
Server farm. As a best practice, Dell recommends using a separate Gigabit Ethernet network
switch to handle iSCSI storage traffic. Two servers are connected to two switches. Each switch
has a path to the MD3000i via the two dual port controllers. In this base HA configuration, the
servers, switches, and MD3000i ports share the same subnet. The NIC ports serving iSCSI
traffic on the ESX servers are teamed.
Figure 1: MD3000i High Availability Configuration
LAN
ESX Server 1
MD3000i
ESX Server 2
MD1000
MD1000
Ethernet Switches
LAN
ESX Server 1
MD3000i
ESX Server 2
MD1000
MD1000
Ethernet Switches
LAN
ESX Server 1
MD3000i
ESX Server 2
MD1000
MD1000
Ethernet Switches
LAN
ESX Server 1
MD3000i
ESX Server 2
MD1000
MD1000
Ethernet Switches