2Gb iSCSI with MD3000i?

[chase1124]

Is this possible? We currently have 1 vSwitch with 2 vKernels on the same subnet and 2 physical NIC's connected. 1 physical NIC is active and the other is unused on one vKernel, and the second vKernel has the same setup but with the active and unused physical NIC's reversed.

Even though two paths are marked as active, it only uses 1 as can be seen in esxtop networking. We can get about 100MB/s throughput. If I turned on Round Robin PSP, I see 1Gb traffic distributed over the two active paths -- so each physical NIC is doing about 500Mb/s. Is this because they are both mapped to the same Controller Port on the MD3000i or something? Confused, Thanks.

James

[chase1124]

No one has any experience with this? There must be someone who has figured out if you can or cannot get 2Gb speed over iSCSI via two 1Gb physical links

[JRink]

I am interested in learning more about this too as I am very new to configuring iSCSI on SANs with two-controllers.

I tend to think the Round Robin technique moreso allows the load balancing of the actual Storage Processors (controllers) versus givingyou the ability to reach 2GB iSCSI speeds. The way I think it through is that it's not concurrently sending iSCSI traffic out both VMKernels at the SAME time, but instead constantly alternating between them. Which, would only help load balance the actual SPs, as opposed to giving you 2GB speeds.

Again, I preface this by saying I am very new to all this, but its how I understand it. Curious to hear your thoughts.

JR