During my training I found out why for iSCSI you need to have a Service Console connection and a VMKernel connection.  Apparently, the Authentication occurs over the service console port and the actual iSCSI communication happens on the VMKernel port.

Also, there is multipathing available on the iSCSI Software Initiator on the ESX 3.0.1 server.  However, it looks like it doesn't work that well on the Netapp.  I think this is because of Netapp's Active Passive clustering, but I'll dig into that more when I get done with Training.

The one thing that struct me during training was a general lack of hands on experience with ESX, and companies treading very lightly into it.  I guess I'm just fortunate that a couple of years ago we were mandated that ESX was the way to go and that we do everything we could to make it work.

Many were scared but I thought it was great and I could see where management was coming from.  While the vision was not complete for a while, we saw the ease of disaster recovery, business resumption, and business continuity with this product.  All you needed to do was invest in the software that replicated your VMs from one site to another and because of the hardware abstraction, as long as the disk files were there, you could run the virtual machine.

In future posts I'll get more into the replication, fall over mechinisms and our implementation of Build Anywhere, Run Anywhere.  Its a good story and I look like a genius.  Just don't tell anyone how easy VMware and Netapp make it!

Cheers,

Chris