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May 19th, 2011 09:00

Best Practice for VNXe, vSphere 4.1 and iSCSI

So far I have been unsuccessful in finding a document that outlines the preferred method for configuring vSphere 4.1 with a VNXe 3300 using iSCSI. I have been over Chad's blog articles and the VMware documentation for setting up iSCSI along with NMP and Round Robin. This is what we have currently configured and it is working. Essentially, I have two ESXi hosts with iSCSI configured on two separate subnets. Each host has two nics (a total of 8 1GB nics are in each host) currently running to each of two switches. Those switches connect to the VNXe with one port from each SP in each switch (Each SP has 4 1GB NIC ports). The iSCSI target on the VNXe has an IP address in each subnet bound to it. Like I said, the setup is pretty straightforward.

So my dilemma is this...is this the best way to set up this environment? I get the feeling it is not, though it works and provides the fault tolerance we want. It seems to limit us, though, in terms of iSCSI bandwidth as we are not trunking the connections from the VNXe to the switches to get the aggregated bandwidth. can someone point me to a best practice for this type of setup and/or outline how this should be set up to best utilize the connections we have.

57 Posts

November 30th, 2011 08:00

Hi Verman,

Sorry for the typing mistake.

It was not "ling the ESC"

It was "ping the ESX"

Thanks,

Rohan Raj

December 2nd, 2011 12:00

Henriwithani,

Thanks for the very detailed information. 

After EMC released version 2.1.0.14097 of the software, I retested my VNXe3100 with both NFS and iSCSI.  The results for me showed little difference between the two.  Of course my little VNXe 3100 only has 10 drives and gigabit Ethernet and NFS may not scale up as well as iSCSI, but in my environment NFS works very well.

I have a question about your setup.  I assume that you had caching disabled on the Advanced Attributes of the VMware NFS share?  That made a huge performance improvement for me.

You can see my results here:

IO Meter Performance Stats?

Best Regards.

75 Posts

May 16th, 2012 11:00

New documet published for the 2.2.0 about this topic: Using a VNXe System with Vmware

@henriwithani

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