VSA and 10G

[Aaron Weller]

I've read a few places that the VSA is limited to a single 1G connection per VSA. Is this applicable across both the ESXi and Hyper-V?

Is there anyway around this, or to increase performance?

Ideally would like to setup some SSD based storage, and 1G is a bit slow on the SD front.

[virtualmatrix · Accepted solution]

We have 20+ VSA based nodes running in ESXi with 10 GigE switches.

We've historically run our VSAs with two vNICs -- not for performance reasons per se, but for manageability reasons -- so that we could keep CMC/management traffic separate and 100% isolate iSCSI traffic. Unfortunately, CMC 9.0 has some problems with the two interfaces and we're having to work around this by either consolidating to a single vNIC (sigh) or allowing management traffic to route to the San/IQ interface of each VSA node.

As for 10 GigE usefulness for performance: Yes -- each host and VSA is leveraging the 10 GigE network bandwidth. In ESX(i), a VM's network I/O is a memory transfer - not limited until you get to the physical adapter. Of course, the actual performance you get will greatly depend on many many diffrent factors.

It'd be nice if there was a way for folks to share performance stats for their particular configuration. It would help the community get an idea of what to expect *and* it would help HP see how people are implementing VSA.

Thoughts anyone?

Is there an "enthusiast" web site for Lefthand/P4000?

[Aaron Weller]

Hi virtualmatrix,

Thanks, that's good news - I was thinking to get some decent performance out of SSDs we might have to put multiple VSAs on the one node.

So with your VSAs, are you seeing performance above 1gbit/s per VSA?

I would definitely find a enthusiast site useful for finding out what sort of performance others are getting with their configurations.

[Bart_Heungens]

Which type of network adapter did you specify in the VM settings? The default E1000 or the VMXNET3?