I was wondering if someone would help with the following query?
I have an HP c3000 blade center populated with blades, each has 6 NICs (1 dual port internal, and 2 dual port mezz cards). The 2 internal NICs and one of the mezz cards' NICs support iSCSI (they are HP NC373s). So that's 4 NICs that support iSCSI on each blade. My SAN is the EqualLogic PS37000x.
So far I have installed ESX Server directly onto the hard disks of 3 of the blades, and added them to to VI Server running on another blade on top of Win2k3 Server.
Question 1: what is the purpose of an 'iSCSI' enabled NIC? Surely for hardware initiated connections to SAN I would need an HBA? And for software initiated connections I could just use a standard NIC?
Question 2: I keep reading that VMKernel supports software initiated iSCSI. Does this mean I can boot the ESX host itself from the SAN? Even though my blades have RAID hard drives, I would still rather boot ESX from the SAN. Do I need an HBA? There seems to be an option in the BIOS of the blades to boot from a SAN, is this related to booting ESX from a SAN?
Thanks,
Mat