Performance tuning on Virtual Infrastructure with MD3000i
Posted by craig 
- on May 25th, 2009 in Server, Storage, Tips, Virtualization, vSphere | 8 Comments »
With the recent experience I had on the deployment with vSphere 4 and PowerVault MD3000i, I found there are plenty of room you may able to further fine tune to improve the performance of the storage and virtual infrastructure. Before this, the initial deployment was done by default configuration without any fine tune yet, and I found that the storage performance looks little bit slow. Therefore, I had decided to further research and fine tune everything we had to improve the performance.
Equipment List
- 2 x R710 with Intel 5530
- 2 x PowerConnect 5424
- MD3000i with 15 SATA Disks
- Software ISCSI initiator from vSphere 4
I was impressed with the functionality of the Dell PowerConnect switch which provide the important features as link aggregation, jumbo frames, ISCSI optimization and etc. Here is what I did. I had enable the jumbo frame on the specify port that connected for the storage and ISCSI connectiones. At the same time, I had also turned on the MTU configuration and jumbo frame setting from the MD3000i management console. You may need to repeat the same action for every data ports that provided by the storage controller on MD3000i. Enable the Jumbo frame and configure the MTU value of 9000 on it. On the PowerConnect switch,I had configured the specify ports on ISCSI optimization and jumbo frames enable. Now it come to the vSphere level, which I had to manually enable the ISCSI vswitch to support the jumbo frame and put in the right value for the MTU.
Command for reference
#esxcfg-vswitch -l   Â
This will allow you to list all the virtual switch you have on the ESX server
#esxcfg-vswitch -m 9000 vswitch1Â Â
this command is to enable the mtu value of 9000 for every nics that connected to the same virtual switch which provide the storage access to ISCSI
#vmkping -s 9000 192.x.x.x  Â
test the jumbo frame setting
The outcome of the jumbo frame enable, I had able to achieve higher throughput on the MD3000i I had and I am happy with the performance of the storage.
Related posts:
- NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) for ESX ready for Download
- VMware vSphere 4 Performance Troubleshooting Guide
- Storage vMotion with Thin Provisioning
8 Responses
Hi Craig,
SO in this case to enable the Jumbo frame i need to have a switch in between ?
because from what i know is that the MD3000i does support the Jumbo frame configured from the MDSM software but the ESXi doesn’t seems to support it, CMIIW.
Thanks.
I am using vSphere 4 without i, that meant the hypervisor come with SSH protocol and Linux command, therefore I am able to turn the jumbo frame on from the host itself. you need to have the jumbo frame enable from storage, esx host and switches. maybe it should able to work without switches, which I did not try before.
hmm .. looks good but Jumbo frame may also create a broadcast storm in your internal network ok if u did not span your tree properly
Good sharing Dr Craig … will test it out with my taiwanese ISCSI box and see it helps or not.
agree with you jirc, the switch I am using here is only for the specify ISCSI traffic, and is isolated LAN from normal network traffic for VM or servers
Hiya,
what is the maximum throughput you can achive using MD3000i? Can you sue more than one pNIc to send / receive iSCSI data? How many vm machines you can run using your setup ?
thanks,
Karol
before this, average read and write from the performance console on virtual center, show only around 80MB/s. Now it able to went up to 130MB/s in the performance tab with mix from read and write, and of course is multi session running on multiple virtual machines and some VM cloning going on. How many VM we can run, I believe is mix up with the number of CPU, Memory, Storages capacity and performance you looking at. Of course you may need to plan your sizing and datastore to meet your requirement. In this environment we setup, we are targeting for 16 VMs with overall 4.8 TB storage in total. May add more in the future.
This is a GREAT post. I am going to be having the EXACT same setup except R610′s instead of 710s to save some rack space. I am going to be using SAS 15k disks instead of SATA though, what are your thoughts on that? I have been told these help a lot with performance of the VM’s. I am going to be housing about 8-10 VM’s, hoping that 1GB links will be enough but everyone says it is.
Thanks for the post, i will be following it during my deployment!
in fact, you can refer to this link for more information, which may be helpful for your deployment
http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/VMware+ESX+4.0+and+PowerVault+MD3000i