Dear list We currently have a AoE SAN running in production that needs several refinements, which I'll tackle in individual mails over the coming days.
Basic layout is as follows: Infortrend storage array with SAS & SATA drives, connected via FC to two storage controllers which export logical volumes with AoE to Xen hosts. Each AoE target is used as a virtual block device, either containing the OS (stored on SATA) or additional storage for working data (SAS for databases & mail, SATA for websites, etc). AoE target is vblade, secondary storage is in "cold standby" mode (toggle FC port states on the switch and start vblade's to take over). Switches are Extreme Networks' Summit 7i. At present we have 30 AoE targets running, when our full migration is done we'll have well over a 100 and have plans to scale up way past that. We run a huge private cloud (we're in the wholesale ISP business) as well as managed private clouds for clients. We're ramping up for a full public cloud offering. Assuming the only optimizations I have done are the following: * AoE in private tag-based VLAN. * Bumped the MTU's to 9000 for all VLAN interfaces and switch ports. * Gigabit ethernet. * Leveraging decent switches with full non-blocking architectures. My next question is on leveraging multiple gigabit connections, which leads me to the following questions: Since vblade uses a specified device, should I use channel bonding to aggregate multiple links together for more performance ? If yes, is 802.3ad the best bonding method since the switch is involved in deciding down which link the ethernet frames are sent, or am I missing the plot on this one. I currently have 4 GBE ports per storage controller that I can leverage, and am considering jumping to dual 10 GBE interfaces to the switch. Then, on the initiator side my understanding is that "aggregation" comes for free. So in this case all I need to do is ensure I have a vlan interface per physical interface on the server, and use `aoe-interfaces` to restrict the scope to the multiple vlan interfaces. If not, would I need to bond here as well? My plan is to setup at least 2 GBE per Xen host. I hope to consolidate this information, and the other questions I'll post over the coming days into several blog posts. The biggest downside to learning AoE is cutting through the tons of AoE vs iSCSI crap and getting to the useful parts. I plan to publish the useful parts. Thanks in advance for the assistance, and the great project. Best -- Kenneth Kalmer kenneth.kal...@gmail.com http://opensourcery.co.za @kennethkalmer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb _______________________________________________ Aoetools-discuss mailing list Aoetools-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/aoetools-discuss
