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nhiservices
Contributor
Contributor

Openfiler poor iSCSI performance? (but SMB fine)

We've built an OpenFiler storage appliance, intended for use as a SAN with our ESXI4 hosts (test servers), but are having problems with write performance to the iSCSI device. It's based on a RAID5 array consisting for 4 SATA HDD's.

We have both an SMB share and an iSCSI device set up on the Openfiler box. Write speed to the SMB share is fine - e.g. a 2Gb file copies across at around 30MB per second. The same file, when copied to the iSCSI device, only copies at 2MB per second however. This is being done in a clean test environment - i.e. no other users, and source and target devices connected directly to the same Gigabit switch.

We're Openfiler and ESXI novices - does anyone have any suggestions for why our iSCSI write performance is dramatically slower than SMB write performance on exactly the same hardware? What config settings should we be considering when diagnosing this problem?

We tried posting a message to the OpenFiler forums last week but didn't get a reply.

TIA for any guidance.

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3 Replies
AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

iSCSI may require more storage "power".

If it provide also NFSv3 over TCP try first with this.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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samansalehi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Would u please tell me, openfiler is a VM or not?

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nhiservices
Contributor
Contributor

Openfiler isn't a VM. It's installed on a partition on the HDD.

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