PE1955 + RHEL5 best practices/documentation

[Matthew Crocker]

Hello,

  I just racked my shiny new Dell Blade chassis with 10 PE1955s (2 x  
quad-core Xeon, 8 Gb RAM, 4 1Gb Ethernet).  The chassis has 4 Dell  
PowerConnect  switches.  I also have a 4.5 TB Dell MD3000i SAN array.   
All of the blades will run RHEL5 with Xen.
Gold 4 hour support on the whole deal :)

So, basically I have 10 systems, each with 4 GigE connections, 4 16  
port GigE switches, 1 GigE per server per switch.  I'd like to make  
this setup bullet proof,  I'm planning on 2 GigE switches for iSCSI   
to the MD3000i and 2 for data.    The Data switch will need to support  
about 5 802.1q VLANs (public, private, NFS, management, ...)

With 2 switches, 2 IP subnets connecting each blade to the M3000i can  
I load balance the traffic and get 2 GigE between the blade and the  
MD3000i?  4 GigE between the MD3000i and the chassis combined?

Is there a way I can bond 2 GigEs into a 2 gigabit EtherChannel across  
two PowerConnect switches?

Is there a way I can link the switches together inside the chassis or  
do I need to run an external cross over cable between them?

The MD3000i has a limit of 16 hosts.  Does that count as real physical  
servers or virtual servers?  i.e., can I run 4 Xen instances per blade  
and have them all run an iSCSI initiator?  Would that be 10 hosts or  
40 from the MD3000i point of view?

-Matt