While configuring Dell PowerStore 1000T for NVMe over TCP, I opted to use two separate storage networks for availability purposes, similar to 2 storage fabric used in a Fibre Channel SAN. So each hosts has 2 NVMe over TCP NICs and each one connects to a separate switch. Each switch only has the VLAN of one of the two storage networks.

For this to work (due to the fact you can only configure the same subnet on the same front-end port for each node) this can only be done when in my scenario, port 2 of both Node A and Node B connect to the first switch, that only has storage network 1, and port 3 of both Node A and Node B connect to the second switch, that only has storage network 2.

So far so good, but as soon as I connected both ports 2 to switch 1 and ports 3 to switch 2, the PowerStore showed me an error: “Appliance port pairs are connected to the same data switch” Which is by design in my case and according to Dell’s best practices to use 2 storage networks for NVMe ….

But luckily there is a Dell knowledge base article (this one talks about iSCSI but it’s the same for NVMe) that says:

So in this scenario, “the warning can be safely ignored” which is what I did