Dynamic Network Factory Blog

NetApp, Dell, EMC and HP collaborated on a post about increasing iSCSI performance under VMWare.  There are some great tips and basics on iSCSI there, but for you StoneFly customers, here is a little advice from our Director of Product Management: Bahman Jalali.

Question 1: How do I configure MPIO (in this case, VMware NMP) and my iSCSI targets and LUNs to get the most optimal use of my network infrastructure? How do I scale that up?
As for MPIO in VMWare environment: If you use a native VMWare iSCSI initiator, it does not have load balancing MPIO, and it only has active/passive or failover.  If you use Microsoft initiator within a virtual machine, then you can have true MPIO with load balancing — but obviously, this doesn’t scale well.  In our target, we take care of MPIO automatically and bond all of our iSCSI ports together and present only one IP address. And when different hosts log into our target, we automatically assign them to different physical iSCSI ports — giving your environment an added boost, with no intervention on your part.

Question 2: If I have a single LUN that needs really high bandwidth – more than 160MBps and I can’t wait for the next major ESX version, how do I do that?
We recommend using a 10G SAN (since many of you already are) and use Microsoft’s initiator within a virtual machine to connect to the SAN directly and bypass the ESX initiator.  And baring that, please come to one of our weekly iSCSI + virtual inftastructure webinars where we discuss optimizing your SAN performance in detail.

Question 3: Do I use the Software Initiator or the Hardware Initiator?
I recommend using the software initiators; the VMWare one if you have many virtual servers, the built-in OS initiators for smaller environments where you want more granular control of the storage setup.  The hardware initiators only make sense when you need to boot directly from the IP SAN.  Otherwise there isn’t much bang for the buck.

Question 4: Do I use Link Aggregation and if so, how?
No need for Link aggregation for our SAN. We only have one IP address that you use to talk to your SAN, and our target handles the rest.

Hope this helps you design your infrastucture.  If you’d like to learn more about using StoneFly with virtual servers visit our virtualization section, virtualization video tutorials,  or download our virtualization ebook.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under 10GbE, IP SAN, StoneFly, iSCSI, virtual servers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.