Best practice recommendations for iSCSI network adapters

Best practice recommendations for iSCSI network adapters

Note : all those settings are enabled by default, we need to disable it as best practice on all iSCSI NICs

Also, if your network/ network devices supports jumbo frames, then that should be enabled too on the network adapters.

Jumbo frames

Jumbo frames are Ethernet frames with more than 1500 bytes of payload. Generally, jumbo frames can carry up to 9000 bytes, but variations do exist. Enabling jumbo frames in specific cases (say, in your Storage Area Network) can improve performance and network throughput. But, if you are enabling it, all devices connecting it including the source, destination and other devices in between like switches etc must support jumbo frames and should be enabled.

Enabling jumbo frames on a VMware virtual network adapter (vmxnet3) is shown below :

Jumbo Packet on vmxnet3 adapter

Steps to enable jumbo frames on a VMware vSphere 4.1 vSwitch is shown below :

List vSwitch

 By default it is 1500 MTU. Say, you want to change vSwitch1 to 9000 MTU. It can be done as follows :

Enabling jumbo frame with MTU 9000 on vSwitch1

You can verify connectivity after enabling jumbo frames by specifying packet size using ping command as given below :

Verifying jumbo frames

Open-E DSS V7 Active-Active Load Balancing iSCSI HA SAN Cluster Operations Guide

Implementing storage cluster - Open-E DSS V7 Active-Passive iSCSI SAN Failover Cluster

The setup that I used for this implementation is mentioned below :

-Two DELL PowerEdge R710 servers (ESXI01 and ESXI02)

-Implemented Open-E DSS V7 Active-Passive iSCSI Failover Cluster – using two VSA’s running on different ESXI 5.5 hosts

• Created VM and installed Open-E Node A on ESXI01
• Created VM and installed Open-E Node B on ESXI02
• Configured separate network interfaces for heartbeat, volume replication and WEB GUI management
• Configured a vSwitch on both ESXI hosts (ESXI01 and ESXI02) 
• Added direct point-to-point connection between the above two ESXI hosts for reliable volume replication
• Configured iSCSI volumes and targets on Node A and Node B
• Configured replication task
• Configured failover cluster with multiple auxiliary paths
• Configured virtual target IP address
• Added target to cluster
• Configured iSCSI initiator
• Tested failover and failback functions successfully

Note :

Detailed configuration guide is given in Open-E website itself

Implementing HA storage cluster - Open-E DSS V7 Active-Active Load Balancing iSCSI HA SAN cluster

The setup that I used for this implementation is mentioned below :

-Two DELL PowerEdge R710 servers (ESXI01 and ESXI02)

-Implemented Open-E DSS V7 Active-Active iSCSI HA SAN Cluster – using two VSA’s running on different ESXI 5.5 hosts

-In Active-Active mode, both nodes of the cluster will simultaneously run volumes providing high availability of data

-Overall cluster performance will be improved compared to Active-Passive mode since the read, write and replication traffic can be balanced on both nodes

-Open-E cluster nodes :

• Node A1 on ESXI01 
• Node B1 on ESXI02 
• Configured separate network interfaces for heartbeat, volume replication and WEB GUI management
• Added direct point-to-point connection between the above two ESX hosts for reliable volume replication
• Configured iSCSI volumes and targets on Node A1 and Node B1
• Configured replication tasks and failover cluster with multiple auxiliary paths
• Configured virtual target IP address and added targets to cluster
• Started cluster

Note :

Detailed configuration guide is given in Open-E website itself

Configuring iSCSI volume using Open-E DSS V7

Configuring ESXI 5.5 server to connect to a iSCSI LUN and mounting it as datastore

Configuring multiple iSCSI LUNs on a single virtual disk (VD) using FreeNAS 9.2

Configuring a iSCSI LUN using FreeNAS 9.2 and mounting it as a disk drive

Storage systems