Essential Reading for VMware ESX iSCSI Users!

Posted on 26. Jan, 2009 by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage

Update: Check out the latest multi-vendor iSCSI post!

I usually don’t write about other peoples’ articles on this blog, preferring to stick to my own independent work. But this time I’m making an exception.

If you use or are interested in VMware ESX 3.x and iSCSI, you simply must go read Chad Sakac’s post on the topic. Co-written with just about everyone in the industry (including EMC, VMware, NetApp, Dell/EqualLogic, and HP/Lefthand), Chad has put together a “cheat sheet” on the ins and outs of iSCSI connectivity and performance in ESX 3.x.

Top takeaways (and I’ve been preaching about these for a while myself, too!)

Ethernet link aggregation doesn’t buy you anything in iSCSI environments
iSCSI HBA’s don’t buy you much other than boot-from-SAN in ESX, either
The most common configuration (ESX software iSCSI) is limited to about 160 MB/s per iSCSI target over one-gigabit Ethernet, but that’s probably fine for most applications
Adding multiple iSCSI targets adds performance across the board, but configurations vary by array
Maximum per-target performance comes from guest-side software iSCSI, which can make use of multiple Ethernet links to push each array as fast as it can go

Thanks for putting together such a great article, guys!

This post can also be found on Gestalt IT: Essential Reading for VMware ESX iSCSI Users!

You might also want to read these other posts...

Tags: Dell, EMC, EqualLogic, ESX, Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet, HBA, HP, iSCSI, LeftHand, NetApp, performance, SCSI, software initiator, target, VMware

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Chad Sakac

Thanks Steve - it was hard to make it multivendor, and involved some compromises - but nothing fatal, and I think the compromises were right to make it multi-vendor.

Two corrections (I'm being an nit/engineer about this :-)
- the 4th bullet is the key one.
- on link aggr , I think you've distilled it a bit too far... it can help, just less than people would naturally expect.... You still need to use something to ensure outbound use of multiple links (something I don't think we did well enough in the post - for a followup) - this is either via link aggregation (but you still need multiple iSCSI targets, and likely will also use MPIO config)

Raymond Brighenti

Can anyone verify this comment from Equallogic? I don't remember seeing anywhere that you'll get performance problems by having a stanby NIC... strange

Please Note: To avoid severe performance degradation, please use the IP or MAC hash option with Multiple Physical trunked/channel group (non-stacked) switches. Having any „stand-by‟ physical NICs in your vSwitch can also result in severe performance degradation.

David

Has anything changed about this since vsphere was released or is this article still up to date?

sfoskett

Yes, the folks have put together an updated post! See it here:
http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/2009/...

webroalty

Very good posting. I just love it.
Good luck man with your work.

http://webroyalty.com

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat