This post is more than 5 years old
30 Posts
0
26461
Equallogic + vmware + BCM57800
Hello,
My r620's come with a BCM57800 with iscsi hw offload.
Is it advisable to work with the hw iscsi initators or with the sw initator of vmware?
Regards
Hans
This post is more than 5 years old
30 Posts
0
26461
Hello,
My r620's come with a BCM57800 with iscsi hw offload.
Is it advisable to work with the hw iscsi initators or with the sw initator of vmware?
Regards
Hans
Top
Anonymous
5 Practitioner
5 Practitioner
•
274.2K Posts
1
May 13th, 2013 07:00
Answer is "it depends".
What version of ESXi and are you going to install MEM?
First thing, you must upgrade the r620 BIOS, and Broadcom FW to the latest versions. For broadcom that's the 7.x FW.
Re: MEM. ESXi 5.1 has an updated Broadcom BNX2i offload driver that's incompatible with MEM, so if you are going to use MEM, for the time being stick with SW iSCSI adapter. MEM especially in multimember groups is superior to HW iSCSI offload w/Round Robin. Broadcom and VMware are aware of the issue.
See this thread for more info about the driver/MEM issue:
en.community.dell.com/.../19506266.aspx
Performance wise I've never really seen a difference. But your mileage may vary. It will help you conserve some CPU cycles.
Also depending on the driver version, and assuming v7.x Broadcom FW, you *should* be able to use Jumbo frames with the offload, but start out with standard frames first.
Regards,
Hdejongh
30 Posts
0
May 13th, 2013 08:00
ah! off course, well i`m going to use the mem driver so i have to stick with the sw iscsi initiator.
thanks don
Anonymous
5 Practitioner
5 Practitioner
•
274.2K Posts
0
May 13th, 2013 08:00
You are most welcome.
The thread I included has info on how to check what driver version, so you can see if you have one of the effected drivers or not.
Regards,