iSCSI design with vSphere and Dell MD3000i

I have setup an ESX 4 server (the first of three for this cluster), and an iSCSI SAN Dell MD3000i connected through two Dell PowerConnect 2816 switches.

Now I'm reading the VMware "iSCSI SAN configuration guide", and I just wanted to make sure I have made the design correcly.

I have connected one ESX (vmnic1) pNIC to one of the pSwitch, and another (vmnic5) to the second one. To this pSwitch the SAN iSCSI ports are connected, so that one of the switches carries the 10.10.10.x subnet, and the other one the 10.10.11.x (see IP plan below)

The two pNICs have a vSwitch each (not sharing one), one portgroup each, and are configured on different IP subnets (see attached screenshot)

IP Plan:

Port group iSCSI-10 (VMkernel): 10.10.10.1

Port group iSCSI-11 (VMkernel): 10.10.11.1

SAN controller 0-0: 10.10.10.10

SAN controller 0-1: 10.10.11.10

SAN controller 1-0: 10.10.10.11

SAN controller 1-1: 10.10.11.11

Using this configuration I could see four different paths to each LUN. and I was able to make the ESX server fail over to different switches/controllers as I was unplugging the network cables from vmnic1 and vmnic5, one at a time.

Then I found the configuration guide section about "esxcli" and configuring multipathing, which I carried out according to the instructions ("esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk0 -d vmhba34" and "esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk1 -d vmhba34")

Now, I have eight different paths to each LUN, of which three are "Active", and one "Active (I/O)" (see my attached screen shot).

So, my questions are:

1. Are eight paths to each LUN really normal in iSCSI designs?

2. Is my choice of vSwitch/pNIC/pSwitch design correct?

Thanks in advance!

/Anders