Looking for a guide on direct connection

[TheUsD]

Hey team,

Looking for someone to point me in the right direction or maybe even help me ask the right questions to seek the ansewrs / help I'm looking for.

I have a test lab I'm building and would like to connect my two ESXi hosts directly to the storage container via SPF+.
The storage container has a dual, SFP+ card and each host has a single SPF+ card. All hardware is verified compatible. I'm not sure if iSCSi or NFS is the appropriate form of connection.

The complete setup is of following:

Two Dell OptiPlex 7070 (which runs the VMs, using ESXI 6.7u3) and has the following networking capabilities:
1- single 1GB onboard nic
1 - 2 dual 1GB nic card
1 - single SFP+ nic card

One OptiPlex 7020 micro (this contains vSphere 6.7u3)
1 - single 1GB onboard nic

TrueNAS TrueNAS-12.0-U2.1

Thanks for your time and please let me know if here is anything else you need or have questions to.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Is the "storage container" as a FreeNAS/TrueNAS? It sounds like you are trying to use the storage device instead of a switch. You can do that, but it requires more networking knowledge. That said, there a number of low cost 10G network options. Mikrotik makes a small (4 port I think) 10G switch that was in the $100-200 range. In addition to adding network complexity, you would also be using some of the CPU cycles from your storage device. Without a better understanding of why you want to go that direction, I probably wouldn't recommend doing it that way.