I’m going to be doing some write ups over the next few days pertaining to getting a small VMWare vSphere 4.1 installation set up. We’ll be using a pair of Dell 6248 Switches, configured in a stack, and a Dell EqualLogic PS4000E iSCSI Storage Array as our back end. In preparation for that I’m going to be going over our switch and network configuration in this post so that it’s clear as to how the network is configured.

We’ll have vlans for each of the following purposes:

• Native vlan 1: we’ll use this as our isolated, un-trunked vlan for this switch, the vlan where unconfigured ports are placed by default. (vlan 1)
• Management: things like DRACs, iLos, UPS management NICs, SAN  Management NICs, etc (vlan 2)
• vMotion: Moving Virtual machines from one host to another host (vlan 3)
• HA: VMWare Fault Tolerance (vlan 4)
• iSCSI traffic (vlan 5)
• and finally all vlans needed for the production virtual servers (vlans 6 & 7 )

1. switchstack> enable
2. switchstack# config
3. switchstack(config)# vlan database
4. switchstack(config-vlan)# vlan 2-7
5. switchstack(config-vlan)# exit
6. switchstack(config)# interface vlan 2
7. switchstack(config-if-vlan2)# name MGMT_VLAN
8. switchstack(config-if-vlan2)# exit
9. repeat steps 6-8 for each vlan, giving each a descriptive name
10. switchstack(config)# spanning-tree mode rstp (assuming you are using rstp with your other switches in your network)

1. switchstack(config)# interface range ethernet 1/g44-1/g48,2/g44-2/g48
2. switchstack(config-if)# switchport mode access
3. switchstack(config-if)# switchport access vlan 2
4. switchstack(config-if)# spanning-tree portfast
   
5. switchstack(config-if)# exit

We’ll also need to define a few access ports for vlan 5, where we’ll be plugging in our pS4000E, follow the exact same steps we used above to configure vlan 2, but substitute vlan 5 for vlan 2, make sure you plug the ports 0 and 1 on the EqualLogic Controller Modules into the vlan 5 ports of your switch, and port 2 on your controller modules into the switch ports for vlan 2 (port 2 on the SAN controller module is strictly for management, and therefore should not be on the vlans used for iSCSI traffic). We’ll also need to enable jumbo frames on the on switch ports that will be moving iSCSI traffic, and disable unicast storm control. To do this enter the following commands:

1. switchstack(config)# interface ethernet 1/g20
2. switchstack(config-if-1/g20)# mtu 9216
3. switchstack(config-if-1/g20)# no storm-control unicast
   
4. switchstack(config-if-1/g20)# exit
   
5. repeat steps 1 – 3 for each port that that connects to a storage array port (only 0 and 1, 2 is for management only)

Also, I normally would not disable unicast storm-control, but when you enable a iSCSI optimization of the Dell Switches, they do this automatically when a EqualLogic SAN is detected on a port, If anyone has the explanation of why this happens please feel free to share it.

Finally we’ll also need to enable flow control at the switch level, to do this enter the following command:

1. switchstack(config)# flowcontrol

1. switchstack(config)# IP Address vlan 2
2. switchstack(config)# ip address x.x.x.x y.y.y.y
3. switchstack(config)# ip default-gateway z.z.z.z

That’s all of the configuration we’ll need at this point, we’ll now setup the EqualLogic San here, and later we’ll configure the switches for Link Aggregation Groups to handle the connections to our ESXi servers.