I am designing the next evolution of our IT infrastructure. I am considering implementing an iSCSI SAN. My current plan is to connect only our servers to the SAN, and then implement any file sharing to the desktops via network shares using one of the servers as a file server. After more reading, I am wondering if I need to implement a file server at all if I have an iSCSI SAN. Here are my questions:
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Would I compromise the performance of the SAN to the servers if I let the SAN traffic run over the whole network, instead of just between the iSCSI target and the servers as clients?
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If I create a "disk" on the iSCSI target, can multiple clients access the same "disk"? If so, can this replace network file shares?
I realize that question 1 is a loaded question, since I did not specify the particulars of my network, but I am just looking for general thoughts about heading down that path. Advance thanks for your thoughtful answers.
Best Answer
If you share the NIC for both iSCSI and normal traffic, yes, however look at the actual traffic you're sending to get a real answer. If there's no router between the servers and the workstations the broadcast overhead of the workstations would hinder performance slightly.
VLAN's are free, use one to seperate iSCSI traffic, most servers have 2xGbe these days, dedicating one for storage usually isn't a problem.
No. That's a NAS (and perhaps what you should be looking at, or at least a combo device like a NetApp).
There are "cluster" filesystems that do this, however they require all the hosts to be trusted and there's a lot of manual configuration involved.
You will also want to look at "zoning" (as it's called in the FC world) to ensure Windows (which will take anything it can get) doesn't steal another host's LUN (think partition)