Deployment Guide

SAN and Internal Networks for iSCSI Appliances
The following prerequisites apply to 10GbE iSCSI appliances. For these appliances, the iSCSI network and internal network share
10GbE ports and switch infrastructure.
■ Prerequisite
□ 10GbE switches can be reached from the rack.
• At least one switch must be available to connect the FluidFS cluster to the Storage Center. An FS8600 appliance cannot
be connected directly to a Storage Center.
• To connect an FS8600 appliance to an SCv2080 storage system, use a switch that supports both 10GBASE-T and SFP+
connectivity.
• For high availability, deploy two switches (one for each Storage Center fault domain).
□ 10GbE switch infrastructure has four LC optical or SFP+ (twinax) connections available for each FS8600 appliance
□ If you are using VLAN tagging, congure one unique VLAN for each iSCSI subnet (Storage Center fault domain).
□ Flow Control is enabled on the switches.
□ Unicast storm control is disabled on the switches.
□ Jumbo frames are enabled on the switches to support a frame size of 9000 bytes.
• Dell PowerConnect and Force10 switches must be congured to 9216 MTU.
• Switches from vendors other than Dell might require a dierent MTU conguration to accept 9000-byte frames.
□ Switches allow multicast between all ports on the iSCSI/internal network.
□ IPv6 is enabled on the switch ports connected to FS8600 appliances.
IPv6 link-local addressing is used for internal network communication. Routing of IPv6 trac is not required on the iSCSI/
internal network switches.
□ IGMP and/or MLD snooping are disabled on the switch ports connected to FS8600 appliances.
□ All switch ports connected to FS8600 appliances are set as edge ports or PortFast to skip Spanning Tree negotiation.
Client Network
Make sure the client network meets the following prerequisites. The client network is used by clients to access SMB shares or NFS
exports. It is also the network used for replication, backup, and administration.
■
Prerequisite
□ 1GbE or 10GbE switches can be reached from the rack.
To ensure high availability to the client network, Dell recommends using a switch stack or Director class switches. Distributing
the client network ports across discrete switches/blades in the stack creates a redundant connection to the core network,
allowing le access to continue after a single switch failure.
□ Ethernet switch infrastructure has ports available for each FS8600 appliance.
• Fibre Channel with 1GbE appliance – Eight RJ45 ports for each appliance
• Fibre Channel with 10GbE appliance or 10GbE iSCSI appliance – Four LC optical or SFP+ (twinax) connections for each
appliance
□ All client ports are in the same broadcast domain or port-based VLAN.
□ Switches are congured to use MTU size equal to or greater than the minimum supported MTU.
• Dell Force10 switches must be congured to use MTU 1554 or greater.
• Dell PowerConnect switches must be congured to use MTU 1518 or greater.
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Deployment Prerequisites