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48515
September 16th, 2011 11:00
Broadcom settings on NIC
We have Dell poweredge servers with broadcom onboard and PCI cards. The settings below are configurable and we can't find anything that says what to set them to. We're connecting them to an iSCSI network that connects to our Equallogic SANs. We heard different things all the time. Please help and if possible provide a link to documentation. All the documentation we can find just says turn on flow control, enable jumbo frames (MTU >= 9000), and that's it.
Ethernet@WireSpeed
Flow Control
Interrupt Moderation
IPv4 Checksum Offload
IPv4 Large Send Offload
IPv6 Checksum Offload
IPv6 Large Send Offload
Jumbo Packet
Locally Administered Address
Number of RSS Queues
Pause On Exhausted Host Ring
Priority & VLAN
Receive Buffers
Receive Side Scaling
Speed & Duplex
Transmit Buffers
Virtual Machine Queues
VLAN ID
VMQ Lookahead Split
The default settings seems to vary, so I don't trust just letting them be.
Also, we were looking at offloading the iscsi traffic to separate pci NICs and were told it would help us to get the following NIC instead of using a basic gigabit NIC. But now we're being told to disable TOE, so I don't know why we'd buy the more expensive NIC.
Basic one: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/broadcom-netxtremeii-5708-pcix/pd?refid=nic_broadcom_5708_toe&baynote_bnrank=0&baynote_irrank=0&~ck=baynoteSearch
Other one: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/broadcom-netxtremeii-5708-pcix-iscsi/pd?refid=nic_broadcom_5708&baynote_bnrank=0&baynote_irrank=0&~ck=baynoteSearch


MrVault
37 Posts
0
October 11th, 2011 21:00
Unfortunately I don't know exactly what you're trying to say. I'm not experienced enough on the network side to fully understand this. I know there are 7 layers (more or less depending on your model), but how this impacts, I'm not sure.