P2000 G3 Throughput

[Chri5]

I have a P2000 G3 iSCSI that has been installed with only 2 ports per controller connected to a switch vlan also connected to the switch are 2 ESX hosts using 2 ports per host for iscsi. Would I get any increase in throughput by connecting the other 4 ports on the P2000 to the switch?  or am I limited by the number of ports on the hosts?

Thanks

[hvhari]

If the bandwidth of the host HBA is more than that of P2000 G3, you can benefit from adding additional ports to VLAN.  As MSA P2000 has multiple options on this host interface, please check the configruatin you have.

Specifications of MSA is available from http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF04a/12169-304616-241493-241493-241493.html

[Johan Guldmyr]

Are your servers maxing out the available bandwidth? For example if your servers have 1x1GbE interface and they're maxing that out, then adding more ports on the P2000 will increase throughput.

For some extra performance consider splitting the volumes/vdisks between the controllers (set ownership).

[DCESstorage]

With my network experiece (or the lack of) - if you are creating typical etherchannel/trunked ports; thruput doesn't necessarily increase between a single-host and a single MSA.

In typical trunking - Switch maps a single MSA port to a single MAC address.

Or, if you can put more MSA ports trunked, and possibly more network-hbas on ESX hosts., and assuming ESX (based on version/driver) can do full use of all 4-ports on the host (and switch in correct configuration) it is possible you could see better performance/thruput.

My typical experience is - if you have MORE/multiple hosts accessing MSA, they will be able to come-thru different MSA ports (as directed by network switch), thus use better overall-performance (aggregate thruput, not necessarily single host thruput).

Try it out and do share!