topic Quad port MPIO performance with vSphere in Array Performance and Data Protection

Quad port MPIO performance with vSphere

BenLoveday — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:51:44 GMT

Hi all,

I couldn't seem to find much around this so hopefully someone out there can help me.

I am trying to find out whether I will get a higher aggregated throughput between my ESX hosts and Nimble storage if I use four 1GbE nic ports on each and configure all four ports in ESX for MPIO (instead of two).

I understand that when using iSCSI within vSphere a single iSCSI connection can't use more than one path at a time but with round robin, etc, has anyone seen an overall higher performance in this configuration?

It seems to be a configuration that isn't very common as a lot of people just move to 2 x 10GbE but in my case for this particular use-case I would struggle to justify the extra cost.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers,

Ben

Re: Quad port MPIO performance with vSphere

etang40 — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 01:36:18 GMT

Hi Ben,

You will see higher aggregated throughput between ESX hosts and Nimble should you dedicate additional NICs for iSCSI AND if you are throughput bound by your existing 2 x 1GbE connections AND assuming you have at least 4 x 1Gbps iSCSI ports on Nimble. You can check in vCenter whether the VMNICs for iSCSI are saturated.

Throughput = IOPS x block size. E.g. 10,000 IOPS x 8KB block = ~80MB/s.

Unless you have either a high IOP or large sequential workloads in the VMs on the host, you may not be saturating the 2 x 1GbE therefore adding additional host NIC ports for iSCSI will provide no additional performnce.

Hope this helps.

-Eddie

Re: Quad port MPIO performance with vSphere

BenLoveday — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 03:06:24 GMT

Thanks Eddie,

That does help, I just wanted to check that from an iSCSI perspective within vSphere I can leverage those additional nics. It's mostly to do with backup and restore throughput which would be largely sequential.

Thanks again!

Cheers,

Ben