Couple questions.

1. Should you always completely separate the storage network switches from production switches or are VLANs fine to segment this traffic? Is there a golden rule here?

2. How do you properly size a switch for your environment based on the specifications the manufacturer provide (Throughput, Forwarding Throughput, Stacking Throughput, Max Mac)?

3. If you have two switch options and one has a maximum Mac address of 8,000 vs. another with 16,0000. What does this really mean to me? How do make sure one vs. another is sized properly for me?

4. Besides VLAN and Jumbo Frame support, is there any other "Must" haves for a virtual environments production or storage networks?

There is a wealth of knowledge on sizing SANs and such, but this seems equally important and it's quite challenging to find as much information.

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Just to add some tidbits of information for the environment. This setup above is referring to the data centers which supports two different locations which have about 100 users between the two in total. The storage traffic will be iSCSI and will be 3 ESXi Hosts and one SAN housing about 2.7TB of data.

Since there is currently no storage network in place (no SAN), I'm having a hard time regarding #2 to really determine what backplane throughput and switch specifications will be sufficient.