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PowerVault supports a DAS or SAN configuration depending on the installed modules. 12 Gb SAS, 10/25 GbE iSCSI, and 16/32 Gb Fibre Channel (FC) are supported configuration options for front-end connectivity to hosts. DAS may not be practical for VDI in your environment because DAS supports a limited number of hosts.
For this configuration, a converged Ethernet environment is used to provide block storage using 25 GbE iSCSI to the workload cluster, and 10 GbE to the infrastructure cluster. A 16/32 Gb FC SAN configuration can also be used to provide block storage for VDI environments.
Testing demonstrated this configuration to be more than adequate for a 500 user VDI workload at scale.
VLANs are configured on the ESXi hosts for each type of Ethernet traffic to isolate and allow traffic prioritization.
One advantage to using a converged Ethernet configuration is reduced complexity and cost. Small office, branch office, and edge use cases benefit when minimizing complexity and hardware footprints with converged networks.
With iSCSI, increasing the maximum transfer unit (MTU) size from a 1,500-byte standard frame to a 9,000-byte jumbo frame is not a requirement, but is recommended. The use of jumbo frames allows greater packet efficiency for higher bandwidth. This change reduces network switch loads because a smaller number of large packets are processed. All devices in the iSCSI data path in this configuration have jumbo frames enabled.
Follow VMware best practices when configuring network settings in vCenter.
For more information, see the document Dell PowerVault ME5: VMware vSphere Best Practices on the Dell Technologies Storage Info Hub.