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25200
May 22nd, 2014 08:00
M610, BCM 57711, Compellent SAN & Boot from SAN - Random Freezes!
For the past 6 months I have been migrating from 4gb FC to 10gb iSCSI.
4gb FC was all boot from SAN on the Dell 1955 platform. All was fine, but I wanted newer technology. I went back and forth with the SAN vendor, and finally decided on 10gb Copper iSCSI.
Initial tests were fantastic, and even now I can iperf at 7.9gb/s, and iometer reports 20k IO, and 355MB/s read, and about 88MB/s write. Copying files locally on any server reaches a max of about 266MB/s. A little less using SMB to another server over the network.
Servers are all Windows 2012. Dual X5570 processors, 64GB RAM.
Unfortunately there are times when the servers will FREEZE up for a few seconds, then catch up. I am stumped on where my next step is.
Main SAN switch is a 48port HP 5900 10GB. The M8024s are configured in SIMPLE operation mode. The BCM 57711 NICs are configured with MPIO to boot from the SAN. SAN traffic resides on it's own VLAN and IP scheme separate from the LAN. The SAN is a combination of 15k and 7.2k SAS, total 64 drives.
So, is anyone else using iSCSI boot from SAN with the M1000e platform?
Did you run into any problems with freezes or performance?
Do you run a local SAS drive for the Pagefile?
Any insight or opinions are much appreciated!
K
kevin1tech
7 Posts
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June 4th, 2014 14:00
Any chance there is a document that explains best practices with the BCM 57711, Compellent SAN, and the M8024 switches?
I can't find much information specific to the hardware, just a few esoteric documents about Windows.
Also interested in the TCP offloading, Large Send Offload, Checksum offload, RSS, etc... Not a lot of info out there on what these really provide in real world performance gains.
As for my hardware, I have upgraded all firmware to the latest available. I know there is network performance as iperf shows me getting about 9.7gb/s. I see peaks of about 266MB/s copying large files locally on the servers.
Pretty sure I am hitting some kind of IO limitation. I have my SAN vendor on the calendar to take a look at some of the reports from Enterprise Manager.
K