Comments on: Performance tuning on Virtual Infrastructure with MD3000i

By: ESX 4 + MD3000i + R710 setup sample from Dell « tstkenny

ESX 4 + MD3000i + R710 setup sample from Dell « tstkenny — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:25:41 +0000

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By: TooMeeK

TooMeeK — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 11:39:16 +0000

Hi, why U didn’t used iSCSI MC/S? ah, right. I belive it is unsupported in vSphere. But iSCSI multipath should be.
U can achieve ~500MB/s using MC/S, it is already supported in open-iscsi package. Also check these pages I found recently:
http://linux-iscsi.org/index.php/MC/S
http://linux-iscsi.org/wiki/KVM
don’t forget to check is Your target supporting MC/S.
I use KVM already and I was looking for fast, shared storage method for a cluster. Tried OCFS2 already, but it had performance impact.

By: craig

craig — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:35:43 +0000

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

By: sixth

sixth — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:09:45 +0000

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!

By: craig

craig — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 03:54:56 +0000

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.

By: Karol

Karol — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:34:08 +0000

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

By: craig

craig — Mon, 25 May 2009 10:07:00 +0000

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

By: jirc

jirc — Mon, 25 May 2009 09:18:06 +0000

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.

By: craig

craig — Mon, 25 May 2009 08:56:14 +0000

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.

By: Albert Widjaja

Albert Widjaja — Mon, 25 May 2009 08:31:47 +0000

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.