Is CRS317-1G-16S+RM suitable as storage network switch (iSCSI)?
https://www.virtualtothecore.com/howto-configure-a-small-redundant-iscsi-infrastructure-for-vmware/
CRSes will be as good as any other managed switch with regard to iSCSI…
The Mikrotik pricing is amazing!
The concern that I would have is that iSCSI traffic is very bursty and I have heard that switches with large buffers are important for good iSCSI performance. I have not seen any information regarding buffer size with the MikroTik switches. We use the CRS317 for have other applications, but have not yet tried them with iSCSI.
Of course Marvell being Marvell everything is under NDA.
The Prestera switching core has some undisclosed amount of “packet buffer memory”.
https://www.marvell.com/switching/assets/Prestera_98DX8216_24-02_product_brief.pdf
I think this chip is optimized more for slinging 10Gb from the in-port to the out-port at near-realtime, so the buffers won’t be too huge.
And that should work quite nicely, considering it does support full sized jumbo frames.
If you plan to involve 1Gb iSCSI clients, that’d be probably better served by a separate switch with SFP+ uplink than adapters/converters - this switch would then also provide some buffering.
related to this topic, how would the switches be setup? Should we use a vlan / network or just having different subnets is enough?
Using VLANs, even if only internally to the switch (i.e. all member ports are access ports), will help at least a tiny bit compared to IP subneting … because broadcasts and multicasts (as little as there might be) won’t get forwarded to useless ports. Additionally you don’t have to plan IP subnet numbering (even though it doesn’t hurt), you can re-use same IP subnet multiple times … I’m not sure that’s a good idea though.