BL460c, ESX and MSA2012i iSCSI Problems

[mharder]

Here some information about our Environment:

1x BladeSystem c3000 Enclosure
1x GbE2c Layer 2/3 Ethernet Blade Switch (Located in Interconnect Bay 1)
3x ProLiant BL460c G1 each of them with one Mezzanine Card in Solt 2 NC373m Dual Port Multifunction 1Gb NIC for c-Class BladeSystem

1x MSA2012i with Standard Controller in Port A

The MSA1012i is connected with both Ports of the Controller directly to the Switch in Interconnect Bay 1 of the Enclosure.
Another Port of the Switch in ICB 1 is connected to our existing Environment.

On each of the BL460c G1 VMWare ESX 3.5 U2 (110268) is installed und functional.
The only thing is, that the 2 Mezzanine Ports are not connected, but i think it's because we have no switches in Interconnect Bay 3 and 4 which the both Mezzanine Ports are should be connected to.
And because of this, our ESX Servers are not showing the Hardware iSCSI in the Storage Configuration - only the Software iSCSI is showed.

Our Management LAN ist 10.1.4.x/NM:255.255.255.0/GW:10.1.4.1

Here the IP Information:
Enclosure OA1: 10.1.4.20/255.255.255.0/10.1.4.1
MSA 2012i RAID Controller IP Configuration: 10.1.4.21/255.255.255.0/10.1.4.1
MSA Controller Host Port 0: 10.1.4.160/255.255.255.0/10.1.4.1
MSA Controller Host Port 1: 10.1.11.100/255.255.255.0/0.0.0.0

The Port 0 Configuration should be switched to: 10.1.10.100/255.255.255.0/0.0.0.0 but here starts our Problem.

The ESX Service Console: 10.1.4.151/.152/.155/255.255.255.0/10.1.4.1 has this IP Configuration on vSwitch0 (eth0).
So i generated a vSwitch1 (on eth1) with 3 vmWare Kernels:
- 10.1.10.155/255.255.255.0/10.1.4.1
- 10.1.11.155/255.255.255.0/10.1.4.1
- 10.1.04.175/255.255.255.0/10.1.4.1

And here are our Problems/Questions:

- In the Storage Configuration Settings i have added the dynamic discovery on 10.1.10.100, 10.1.11.100 and 10.1.4.160.
If i remove the 10.1.4.160 discovery, the ESX Server will not find any iSCSI Targets. It should find the 10.1.11.100 IP at least...

- In the actual Configuration the iSCSI is integrated in our ESX Environment, but the performance ist really bad. The Disk i/o is really slow.
We think, that da IP Configuration is duty on this perfomance problem. But we can't switch to the new IP Segment, because it's not working ;)

- Is it recommended, to add another Switch into Interconnect Bay 3 oder 4, or in both to solve the problems? If we add 2 more switches into ICB 3 and 4, the ICB 4 is the redundance for ICB 3?

Kind Regards,

Mike

P.S.: If you need more Information please ask :)

[Buck76]

Hi.

I am a collegue of Mike.

What we will do first is to update MSA to actual version J210P03.

Bye Thomas

[Buck76]

Updating to the actual firware version did not solve our problems. We also enabled "Host Control of Write-Back Cache" to get more performance, but no luck.

After that we wanted to configure the LAN segments as descriped above. But no connectivity from VMware Host to MSA was possible (no ping, no initiation). That is the thing we do not understand...

Bye

[Buck76]

As reconfiguring VMWare hosts,

"- In the Storage Configuration Settings i have added the dynamic discovery on 10.1.10.100, 10.1.11.100 and 10.1.4.160.
If i remove the 10.1.4.160 discovery, the ESX Server will not find any iSCSI Targets. It should find the 10.1.11.100 IP at least...!

is solved!

but still poor performance... any ideas?

[ZAFER_2]

Did you try to enable Jumbo frames in both MSA2000 and Blade switches??
There is information about how to do it in the userguide of MSA..

[Uwe Zessin]

> And because of this, our ESX Servers are not showing the Hardware iSCSI
> in the Storage Configuration - only the Software iSCSI is showed.

VMware ESX understand QLogic hardware iSCSI initiators only.

> So i generated a vSwitch1 (on eth1) with 3 vmWare Kernels:

You also need a COS interface in any of these subnets, because the COS does the authentication when the software iSCSI initiator is used.

> The Disk i/o is really slow.

Please describe you setup and how you are testing.

Yesterday I have installed an MSA2012i at a customer site. I ran iometer against a volume on a 4-member RAID-5 vdisk.
With 16kbyte sequential reads I could get more then 100 MegaBytes/sec from the box - writes with about 50-60 MB/s.

Then I switched to 512 **BYTE** I/Os. We got more than 11,000 I/Os, but only 5-6 MegaBytes / sec. iSCSI works like any other I/O ;-)

In this setup I ran both controller's Port_0 in one IP subnet and Port_1 in a different one. Created a COS interface and a VMkernel port in both subnets. Added all 4 MSA IP addresses to the discovery.