VMware ESX, iSCSI Targets – Redundancy

This is the ideal config for 6 nics assuming you will add addtinal servers and utilize HA, DRS and vMotions.

Nic1 Service Console in main vlan100, main subnet

Nic2 Vmotion in main vlan100 Separate subnet

Nic3 and Nic4 both trunk ports for VMs to use

Nic5 and Nic6 - iSCSI Nics – in iscsi vlan, 2 separate subnets (assuming your SAN/NAS as 2, dual port controllers.

Be advised it is NOT recommended that you use teaming with your iSCSI nics. They should also be separate from your other services, I.E. vMotion, SC, Trunks etc. Using teaming will cause a delay in the event of a failure. It can also slow down the systems as your storage switches between controllers. I can explain in more detail if needed.

The vNIics however should use team. The nics in that team, Nic3 and Nic4, should be trunk ports on your switch.

As far as the iSCSI address change is concerned if you have changed the ip-address of the vmkernel port you are using for iSCSI then for ESX 3.5 you will have to reboot the ESX host otherwise things will get unstable. That's if the change refers to the iSCSI Software initiator on the ESX Server. If that hasn't changed and you just want to change the iSCSI target address the initiator is pointing to then just change the properties in the initiator [Config Tab, Storage Adaptors, iSCSI Software Initiator, Dynamic Discovery, Add Send Targets Server] to point to the new iSCSI target address. Again a reboot is strongly recommended, the ESX 3.5 Software initiator does not like changes. If you use iqn's for access control on the iSCSI target changes like these are simpler since you don't need to modify the ACL's when changing the initiator ip-addresses provided that works with your iSCSI target of course.

I'm not sure about your first question, I've never paid attention to that message on an ESX console after I've changed an SC address. Two questions - [1] does the new address work for web management? [2] Did you re-create\directly modify vswif0 when changing the SC address or did you just add a new SC port and disable vswif0?.