MSA2012i Poor Throughput BXOIS Errors

[Kevin Hand]

I am reposting this forum entry as it appears to have disappeared although others are experiencing the same problem

To give you an idea of our configuration we have 10 x HP BL460c Blade Servers in a C7000 chassis connected to an HP MSA2012i with 12 x 450Gb SAS drives and we are using HP D2D2503i for disk based backup. The servers are running 2008 x64 enterprise but I have also recreated the problem on 2003 32bit standard.

The problem we are experiencing is basically poor performance in backup and in moving files between servers-between volumes on the MSA. In addition to the poor performance we also receive errors in the system event log at the time of data transfer. These errors relate to BXOIS and appear in groups of three as data is transferring accross the network. The 1st states that the target failed to respond in time to an NOP request. The second message states that the connection to the target was lost and finally you get a message to say the connection was lost but the initiator successfully reconnected to the target.

We have updated all the drivers along with the Network Configuration Utility to the latest versions but the problem is still occurring. The two NIC's are configured with iSCSI enabled within the utility. We have installed licenses for the Accelerated iSCSI pack. We have also updated all the firmware on all the servers and the MSA device to no avail.

Basically if we attempt to backup files from local disks to the D2D backup unit then we get a rate of up to 2Gb per minute (still not as fast as advertised) but if we backup a volume from the MSA shared storage to the D2D then we get around 20mb per minute. At this time we also receive the errors in the system event log.

Similarly if we attempt to copy files across the network from a shared storage volume to another shared storage volume then again we get poor performance and the same error messages.

[Uwe Zessin]

I've looked for "BXOIS" and it seems to be related to "boot from iSCSI" - do you really boot from iSCSI?

[Kevin Hand]

No we do not boot from iSCSI. The blades have mirrored 72Gb local drives.

The errors occur during backup and when copying files accross volumes on the MSA 2012i.

[Chad Ray]

I have the exact same problem happening, using the latest NCU, latest firmware and all. I have 3 x BL460c servers connecting to 2 MSA2012i's.

How many ethernet blades do you have?

Do you have any VLAN's created for the ISCSI traffic?

Are you using external switches to connect the MSA & Chassis together?

[Kevin Hand]

We have 10 BL460c Blade Servers, we are not using VLAN's we have enabled iSCSI using Network Configuration Utility. Everything seems to work its just the performance is really poor

We have GbE2c Ethernet blade switches in interconnect bays 1 and 2 in our C7000 chassis and the MSA is connected to the external ports of those switches as outlined in the diagram in the MSA 2012i manual

[Chad Ray]

Are you using network teaming on all the servers?

[Wa_4]

Operating System Windows Server 2008 is not supported on the MSA2012i, (see below). Please check the quick specs of the msa, and you will confirm this http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12992_div/12992_div.HTML (Check OS Support section). You cannot predict the performance on a non tested configuration on 2008.

Are you guys using teaming for failover, or for load balancing? How do you have the teaming set up?

[Chad Ray]

Teaming for failover, network fault tolerance only.

All servers are 2003 X86, 2 STD & 1 Enterprise

Using Iscsi Initiator 2.07 on 2003 STD and 2.08 on 2003 Enterprise.

[Rik Boers]

Hi, please check out advisory c01715951

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c01715951&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

This exactly describes your issue on the MSA2000 and gives the solution.

Regards,

Rik