So today I ran into a interesting need: how to get our Dell Equalogic to talk to a VM so that SAN HQ can communicate to the SAN array. I tried something I’ve never done before to the iSCSI-based vSwitch, settting up a VM Port Group to the vSwitch. I never heard of this being done but in practise it seem logical to me so I gave it a go.

So as you can see in the picture below I just mapping the VM Port Group as a secondary NIC to the vCenter VM and now I can manage the SAN from that VM. Of course you need to assign a IP address to the local area connection in Windows and enable jumbo frames for it to work correctly but it was relatively easy to setup.

Just thought I’d share, maybe someone else will find this helpful.