I've successfully configured my Windows 2003 guest with a couple of vnics to access my EqualLogic storage. I setup the MS iscsi initiator and installed the Dell Host Integration Tools for Windows. Using ESXi 5.0 and the vmxnet3 nic driver.
However, even though I configure the vnics to use jumbo frames, it only connects to the EQL using standard frame lengths. The only option for jumbo frames in the vmxnet3 driver is 9000.I have enabled jumbo frames everywhere else, on the vswitch, physical switches, and san controllers. In fact, if I disable in-guest iscsi and use ESXi iscsi instead, I get jumbo frames detected fine. As soon as I switch to in-guest iscsi (using the same vswitch) I get standard frame lengths even though 9000 frame length is selected.
Has anyone got any suggestions? The reason I want to use guest iscsi is so I can use Dell ASM/ME which takes VSS-enabled san snapshots. I can't do this if I use ESXi iscsi. I know I can use ASM/VE but that is not VSS aware and is a tool to solve different problems.
Is anyone else doing a similar thing? Should I just use standard frames anyway? I want to get it right upfront because once it goes into production it will be hard to make changes.
