ESX 3.0 and NetApp FAS270 iSCSI Target Performance

[Atko]

Hi,

I am currently investigating installing ESX 3.0 onto blade hardware and using an existing NetApp iSCSI FAS270 to store the virtual machines on. Looking at approximately 30 virtual machines, including SQL but may leave this out of scope initially as I believe we may run into performance issues. The filer currently is relatively under utilised.

Has anyone had any experience with running ESX 3.0 with FAS270’s using iSCSI ??? My gut feel says to me that the 2 gigabit Ethernet connections on the NetApp are going to be the bottle neck, and whilst the underlying disk subsystem will be cable of running it, the Ethernet side is not going to be able to keep up…

Whilst I am on the subject has anyone got any good rules of thumbs with regards to measuring disk I/O, to an extent where the results are meaningful 

Cheers

[einstein-a-go-g]

Just attached ESX 3.0 to a FC270 and FC3020 using dedicated storage gigabit VLAN, configured as dual port gigabit, with failover e.g. 1GB iSCSI port only, filer has only SATA discs, not attached to head with FC discs, not seeing any performance issues at present, but only slowly building up VMs. But we have 60 VMs to migrate from local storage on 6 x ESX 2.5.3 DL585 Quad Dual Core to this environment in the future, so we can utilise NetApp SAN Snapshot for DR/Backup.

[ITThies]

We got two ESX Server (HP DL 380) attached to a FAS270c using the fiber channel connection. Atm. we are running 12 productional machines and one sap testserver on it without any performance issue.

We are running some different services on the prod. vm´s now like mssql db, webservice, terminal services and file services.

We got no complaint by the users until yet

[Laurens]

I have a customer who wants to connect around 8 VMware servers (HP C- blade servers with 2 proc, 3,0GHz Dual Core) on a FAS270.

And they also want to replicate to their other site where a second FAS270 is operational through ISCSI.

They want to virtualize also SQL and Exchange servers.

My customer will prefer to use VMware as Host OS so he can easily replicate between the sites. (on the second site there will be servers in case a failover will be needed.

My question is the same... Can I expect performance issues with the FAS270 using ISCSI ?

Looking forward to a respons !

Regards, Laurens

[kspades]

not to hijack the thread or anything, but am I the ONLY one that cant get iSCSI working correctly on my FAS270 with ESX3? ESX sees the LUN but when I try to add it into the storage datastore it fails with "cannot add"

einstein-a-go-go: do you mind if I contact you about getting iSCSI working on ESX3 and FAS270?

[shaneyoder]

It is really hard to say how your workloads will be affected by moving to iSCSI. Just for comparison, here's my setup:

3 ESX Hosts

FAS3020C

1 active Network adapter on each ESX host for VMkernel (iSCSI) traffic

2 active Network adapters on FAS3020 (vif'd)

I have 20 active VMs. 6 VMs also run MS iSCSI initiator to support SnapDrive/SnapManager.

I have had no performance issues relating to iSCSI or Disk I/O. The only performance concerns are CPU related. I have some heavy hitting SQL servers (1 of which is a 4 vCPU and averages 60% CPU utilization).

So, I don't think the FAS will be a bottleneck in most situations. If a VM creates enough Disk IO to create a concern, perhaps it shouldn't be virtualized.

[nwallaceml]

Reviving an old thread.....

We are thinking of outfitting a small site with a FAS270 and a pair of ESX hosts using iSCSI for storage. It looks like you folks were getting your deployment setup and I was wondering if you have had any troubles or performance issues over the last couple months? How large are your deployments? And finally, any lessons learned?

Thanks,

Nathan

[robinhoodis]

Did you get your FAS270 with ESX3 over iSCSI working ?

I have the exact same hardware and the exact same problem

ESX can see the netapp, but not the luns

[robinhoodis]

Sorry I got the iSCSI with the Netapp FAS270 working. It turned out that I had a bad port in my patch panel.