Good question, it avgs just under 1.0 for the duration of the test.
The odd thing is that writes remain 90+ MB/s... so that would imply the network segments are configured correctly... I also added a second iSCSI LUN and used the Win2K3 iSCSI initiator and the performance is even MORE abysmal... so that would SEEM to eliminate the ESXi software iSCSI initiator from the equation... It's gotta be on the SAN side.... Why on earth would reads be slower than writes? Hmmm -sc From: Jeff Bunting [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 5:10 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: VMWare/iSCSI question Does the latency to the disks/datastores look OK? Can't think of much else that you didn't already cover... Jeff On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Steven M. Caesare <[email protected]> wrote: Not an NT-specific question per se, but thought I'd float it out there, as I've seen similar discussed: So, I had ESXi 4.0 seeing ~93MB/sec on 1Gb links to my OpenFiler SAN. Not bad , as that represents ~750Mbps before overhead on the link. I upgraded my box to 4.1. Well, actually I re-installed v4.1, as I decided to install to a USB flash drive, in order to eliminate spinning media in the ESXi hosts themselves. After the new install, I imported the existing machines that were originally living on the 4.0 build (they were in a separate data store). I also installed additional NICS and added more mem to the SAN. My speeds dropped by about a third to ~63MB/sec. (Actually I got the same ~90+ speeds ONCE, and then I decided to rebuild the RAID array as a RAID0 stripe, rather than a RAID5, in order to see if I could completely saturate the gig network links, it dropped after that) Things I've tried: 1) Updated the VMware tools in the guest OS's 2) Double checking the iSCSI parameters in vSphere and OpenFiler 3) Double checking my virtual nic/switch setup 4) Confirming jumbo frames connectivity over the iSCSI network path(i.e. ping -d -s 8000) 5) Reverting back to the original NICS 6) Removing the additional memory in the SAN 7) Rebuilding the arrays back to their original RAID5 state 8) Rebuilding the volumes/LUNs on the SAN 9) Upgrading the Guest VM's from Virtual Machine v4 to v7 10) Pulling out my hair Things I haven't done, and why: a) Reverting back to ESXi 4.0u1 - This actually shouldn't be too hard to do, as the drives with the existing ESXi build are still in the server, just at a lower boot priority... I'd just have to pull the USB key. The problem is I don't know how the guest OS's are going to behave now that they are newer machine types (altho v7 is supported on ESXi 4.0u1 it seems), and have newer versions of VMWare tools installed on them. b) Going back to spinning ESXi boot media rather than the USB flash drive. All our new Dell servers have the option to boot ESXi from internal SD card, and it doesn't appear that the ESXi kernel really needs high-performance _BOOT VOLUME_ storage once it's up and running. Open to all suggestions -sc ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
