Storage connectivity

Connections to storage are not cluster-controlled networks; in fact, you should specifically disallow cluster communications on those networks. They must be accounted for as you design your cluster's networking, however. TCP/IP storage connections are something of a special consideration as you may wish to completely isolate them from other types. The basic concepts around connections to storage were covered in Chapter 4, Storage Design. To recap, teaming is not appropriate for iSCSI or SMB 3.0 storage. MPIO should be used when multiple dedicated adapters are available for connections to iSCSI. SMB 3.0 connections can be left for multichannel to automatically determine the optimal connections to use, or you can also manually specify which adapters to use.

For optimal performance of the network connection to storage, the key is usually latency, which is the amount of time it takes for a network packet to travel from source to destination. The principal design consideration...