Celerra virtual interfaces

Okay, the best pratice we do is to create multiple interfaces and use it for different protocols and maintain the availibility and load balancing as well.

Please do rate the ans

Sameer Kulkarni

Correct, so right now, on my NS502 I have the following configured on the iscsi side:

I'm just trying to understand if it makes similar sense for creating an interface for each of the protocols, the reason I did it on the ISCSI side was it seemed to give vsphere more paths to hit the storage on helping spread the load across the fail safe network we created on the celerra side.  Now i'm just wondering if I shoudl do the same for NFS where I create a new interface if you will, and have hosts access NFS only storage through that interfaces, and keep the other protcols seperate

thanks for taking the time to provide some insight into emc best practices, it makes sense.

Hi,

you mean to say you want to create multiple interfaces and use it for differrent purposes like  iscsi and nfs etc? or can you please elobarate

Sameer Kulkarni

I have a failsafe network create out of the four interfaces on the primary data mover, three interfaces are primary and the fourth is standby.  This setup does in fact spread the network load across the various interfaces in the FSN.  My apologizes if I wasnt clear, or used faulty terminology.

maybe one of EMC guys can pitch in ..but i would not think assigning multiple interfaces to fsn0 would help in terms of performance vs just using one interface for all iSCSI clients.

the reason I did it on the ISCSI side was it seemed to give vsphere more paths to hit the storage on helping spread the load across the fail safe network we created on the celerra side.  Now i'm just wondering if I shoudl do the same for NFS where I create a new interface if you will, and have hosts access NFS only storage through that interfaces, and keep the other protcols seperate

not sure what you mean by load balancing across the fail safe network. In fail safe network only one interface/trunk is active and the other one is stand-by so by assigning multiple interfaces to the same devices not going to do anything in terms of load balancing.

I am attaching the following document:

It is recommended that you create multiple interfaces for the different protocols you're going to use.  For CIFS, each CIFS server requires its own interface.  For NFS, you can use one interface for various clients, or create a specific interface per client. 

Unless you count ease of management, there really are no PROs to using one interface for multiple iSCSI Luns. The CON is if high bandwidth is needed, you're only using one interface and no redundancy unless trunking or FSNs are used.

-Sebby Robles

don't overdo it - for NFS an interface per client is overkill

Hello folks.

In this particular case, you have a 3 gig trunk.  Unless the whole of your IO is close to, or more than then 3gig trunk can handle, you should not see network performance issues.  You have the option to create multiple interfaces, one per iSCSI LUN.

I am attaching an iSCSI best practices document.  This is mostly for SQL and Windows serveres, but does have some network best practices.

- Sebby Robles

* If this post has helped you, please take a moment to rate it.  Thank you. *

Yeah for us, it was easier to create one FSN that was created from three physical interfaces, and allow our environment iscsi/cifs/nfs all get bind to a virtual interface thats boung to the FSN

Here you can see then that I have traffic flowing across each physical interfaces:

From my understanding, if you create multiple targets, you decrease the chances of one particular protocol or protocols from always using the same interface???  Right/wrong? 

sebbyr,

can you comment on advantages of creating more than one iSCSI interface/portal per fsn0 ?

when i say "interface" , i mean IP address ..not the actual physical interface on datamover.

I'm apoligize.  I meant to say per dedicated NFS server.  Not per NFS client.

i realize what interfaces are in Celerra terminology. Here is your statement below, are you referring to interfaces here as ip address or physical interfaces on datamover ?

"Unless you  count ease of management, there really are no PROs to using one  interface for multiple iSCSI Luns. The CON is if high bandwidth is  needed, you're only using one interface and no redundancy unless  trunking or FSNs are used"