Networking for iSCSI
May 25th, 2008 @ 3:34 am
I’ve received several comments and question on my post from a few days ago, “iSCSI Slow? I Think Not.” The network hardware is critical for peak iSCSI performance. I think a brief follow up with some details on our network configuration are in order.
We are using a Cisco Catalyst 6506 switch at the core of our network, which handles all of our iSCSI traffic. The current configuration looks like this:
- (1) WS-X6K-SUP2-MSFC2 with PFC2 supervisor module
- (2) WS-X6148A-GE-TX gigabit modules (connects all server and iSCSI devices)
- (1) WX-X6414-GBIC fiber module (backbone to all of our IDF’s)
All SAN ports are configured for Jumbo Frames and Flow Control.
The servers are HP DL360 G5’s with NC360T Nics. I just deployed a new ESX server with with a QLogic iSCSI HBA, but I don’t really have any benchmarks on that yet. I’ll post some details on that once I run some benchmarks. I’m interested in whether there will be a big performance increase over the ESX software iSCSI initiator.
We been long time Cisco customers, and stayed that for our switchs and routers just to keep our lives simple as we run ip telephony call center.
Since buying Dell EqualLogic and really looking into our 4510 SUPV product.. looks like we got our port numbers but dont have all the bandwidth or features really to run iSCSI.
Have you lookied at any other switchs ? Did you talk to your EqualLogic team on which switchs you should be buying into, or did you already own your Cisco products?
Comment by Customer X Factor — May 26, 2008 @ 6:45 pm