Connecting a VM to Equallogic Array

[Aggy]

First off lets give a brief decription of my set up:

4 x ESXi Hosts each with 12 Nics, 4 to the SAN, 4 to the LAN, 2 for DMZ and 2 for Vmotion

All hosts are configured with the Equallogic MEM plugin which also configured the vswitches on the host

4 x Equallogic arrays

My question is what is the best method to hook a virtual win 2k8 box up to the SAN for things like Exchange so we can make use of VSS.

So far i have tried creating the VM, adding the additional hard drives as VMFS volumes, this resulted in poor performance

I've tried adding the volumes as RAW luns through vmware, this gives better performance, running the network cards at and looking at the performance graphs of the host shows all network cards to the san in use when copying a 50gb file from one drive to another, but doesn't give me the VSS features, the nics average about 19KBps and the copy speed is around 70MB/sec

I've tried giving the virtual machine 4 nics connected to the SAN network, installing the equallogic hit kit for windows on to the virtual machine and enabling multi pathing to the san for two luns, again tried copying the 50gb file from one drive to the other and can see utilization on all 4 nics in the windows machine, but on the performance graphs for the host, only see two network cards in action, having said that, this gives me the best performance on the 2 nics at 48KBps and the copy speed is around 90MB/sec

I understand the multipathing hit kit for windows makes use of all the network cards and can see that working, but how is the virtual switch going to know to use all four network paths?  It doesn't seem to want to do it.

Any advice, questions or anything would be good!

[idle-jam]

see if this is helpful to you: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/03/18/iscsi-multipathing-with-esxcliexploring-the-next-version-of-...

[AndreTheGiant]

ASM for VMware can only handle VM snapshot.

If you plan to use ASM for Exchange, for example, you must install HIT into the VM and have a iSCSI initiator inside it.

I usually add a VM portgroup to iSCSI vSwitch.

Andre

[Aggy]

Hi that's what i've done, my question is how do you get/can you get the equallogic multipathing inside the vm guest to use all 4 network cards of the host that it's currently on.

When using the initiator inside the vm, with 4 network cards, you can see all 4 inside the vm working, but only 2 on the physical host.

I've set up the virtual switch as per that guide with one nic per vmkernel port.

Thanks guys

[AndreTheGiant]

ok, in this create create 4 VM portgroup (for example iSCSI1, 2, 3 and 4).

For each portgroup set a single binding to only one pNIC (you can set this in teaming tab).

Andre

[Aggy]

Thats already done Andre, the Equallogic MEM plugin sets this up for you.

I can also already see all the multi paths in vmware as well.

I honestly don't think it's possible to have true multipathing from a virtual machine to a san...

[AndreTheGiant]

I mean 4 VM portgroups, not the vmkernel porgroup.

If you make 4 VM portgroup (with static mapping to pNIC), you can have 4 vNIC on different pNIC and have multipath in guest OS.

Andre

[s1xth]

Aggy-

What types of switching are you using in your environment?

What brand NIC's are you using on the ESX hosts for iSCSI traffic? Broadcom or Intel's?

Are you using jumbo frames? -- If so...make sure you set your jumbo frames on the nic INSIDE the guest OS to support Jumbo also.

iSCSI in the guest is regular IP traffic to VMware. It doesn't need to know that its "storage traffic" per se. I have a similiar configuration as you and I can max out my iSCSI connections inside the guest OS.