I am designing our vSphere farm – we'll be migrating from ESX 3.5 to 4.1. I plan to set up a new farm using ESXi 4.1, and move the Virtual Machines on the 3.5 farm into it by shutdown, then import.
In ESX 3.5 there is no distributed networking, so each host has a vSwitch connected to my SAN NICs, and a port group for the vmkernel.
In vSphere (ESXi 4.1) I have the extra option to set up a distributed vSwitch and distributed port groups for vmkernel to access iSCSI storage.
Is there any benefit to this, or should I stick to non-distributed networking for iSCSI.
Best Answer
Not the answer you want to hear but we've had so many problems with distributed switches, even with 4.1, that we don't use them at all, let alone for iSCSI. As for benefits, none leap to mind.