iSCSI NIC teaming

[bublik]

Hello All,

I am seeing 85% iscsi interface utilization on my iscsi network adapter that is on physical windows 2003 host.

There is no NIC teaming for iSCSI even though I have 2 of them configured.

I have P4500 G2 28.8 SAN. Networking configured with ALB.

Can anyone tell me if HP recommends to do NIC teaming on my windows host? I know some manufacturers recommend not to.

Will jumbo frame configuration help me to resolve bottleneck on my GB network?

Can't do 10GB. not affordable at this time.

[Dan Nichols]

Have you installed the HP DSM for MPIO?

This will install Windows MPIO and enable multipath support and load balancing for iSCSI.

[bublik]

I did but by looking at interface utilization sometimes only one iSCSI interface is used heavily. So it does not load balance correctly I suspect.

[Dan Nichols]

Have you created a connection to the iSCSI target (the cluster IP) from each iSCSI NIC source IP address?

[bublik]

Yes, I did. Specified different source IP and specified the target for each iSCSI adapter. I have MPIO policy set as round robin. By looking into task manager i see the both interfaces are being used so maybe it is working correctly. I have to look into my utilization reporting to see if it was incorrect.

But if I chose to minimize the utilization with the fact that there is no budget for it, do you know if configuring jumbo frames would help to minimize network utilization?

Thank you

[Dan Nichols]

I have had little success with jumbo frames in the 1Gbps world. The advice I have been given is that implementing jumbo frames on a 1Gbps network will make little to no performance improvement. I presume that you have enabled flow control though? This should stop your network from grinding to a halt when heavily loaded.

With 10Gbps jumbo frames is recommended for optimal throughput.

[bublik]

Flow control is not enabled. Not sure how evenly DSM MPIO is designed to balance the traffic but I don;t think it is working right. It is a small traffic when I took this snapshot. So if there would be larger traffic the difference would be substantial i think.