4200 iSCSI performance solved getting 100 MBs per nic

[troysorzano]

I was never really happy with the performance I was getting on the Readynas 4200 about 95 MBs read. It was OK but not great for having multiple nics. So I finally did some optimization this weekend.

The trick was to turn off teaming on the Readynas and have each NIC on a separate Vlan. Then setup ESXi for MPIO round robin in the GUI with 4 NICs on separate Vlans. You would think this is enough but it is not. I was still getting 95MBs performance but instead of seeing 1 nic 100% utilized I saw 4 NIC's 25% utilized. This had me stumped till I found an article about MPIO round robin IOPS and how by default it is set to 1000. It needs to be set to 1. So this ESXi 5 command must be run on each host from SSH.

for i in `ls /vmfs/devices/disks/ | grep naa.600` ;
do esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -d $i --iops 1 --type iops;done

Once I did that my read performance went from 95MBs to 400MBs with 4 NICs using the vmware OpenPerformanceTest.icf on IoMeter.

Now I am thrilled with the performance of the Readynas 4200 and feel comfortable virtualizing my Exchange server.

A detailed step by step guide has been posted here https://sites.google.com/site/abraindump/readynas-vmware-iscsi-performance

Troy

[TeknoJnky]

nice guide, I'm sure it will be very helpful for others

[geekgee]

Yes... thanks much Troy.

The iops change increased the throughput I was getting on a Pro 6 from 135MB/s to 228MB/s.

I did a little a further testing using different iops and found that a setting of 4 gave me the best performance... at least for the "Open Performance Test, Max Throughput - 100% Read" test. Not a huge increase but measurable and consistent.

[troysorzano]

geekgee,

I saw that dell equallogic recommends 3 for IOPS. But in my setup I could not see a difference between 1 ,3 and 4. In your setup what was the difference between 1 and 4 IOPS? I am curious.

Thanks,

Troy

[geekgee]

It wasn't very much at all... less than 1MB/s so nothing to get excited about. I originally thought it was just an insignificant variation but 4 was consistently a bit higher than the rest across a number of runs so it must just work slightly better in my setup.

Code: Select all

iops   IO/sec     MB/s
1      7,284.00   227.65
2      7,304.76   228.27
3      7,289.07   227.78
4      7,307.41   228.36
5      7,287.13   227.72
6      7,277.08   227.41
8      7,240.63   226.27
16     7,259.94   226.87


[pain2k]

Hi,

I made the same configuration as it is described in the Guide:
https://sites.google.com/site/abraindump/readynas-vmware-iscsi-performance

But I can only see 1 Path. Is multipathing only available on the 4200er unit, as I am using a Pro6?

Would be nice to get some feedback have you Guys are doing Multipathing with the ReadyNAS Systems.

thx

pain2k

[pain2k]

Hey!

The Forum response was better a while ago!
What happened to this forum?

[1-0-1]

Is this also applicable to NFS?