Initiator (iSCSI, FCoE, AoE, iSER and NVMe over Fabrics), iSCSI accelerator and RAM disk
Moderators: anton (staff), art (staff), Max (staff), Anatoly (staff)
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mattaw
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Tue Mar 02, 2021 6:13 pm
Wed Mar 03, 2021 1:37 am
Can the StarWind iSCSI Accelerator work with the older ROCEv1 Connectx-3 implementation? (Note: Note Connectx-3 Pro which supports ROCEv2). I am debating whether I need to upgrade to Connectx-3 Pro or better.
[Maybe this should be an additional question, but does the NVMe-oF initiator require Windows 10 Pro for Workstations as a minimum?]
Thanks,
Dr Matthew Swabey
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yaroslav (staff)
- Staff
- Posts: 2904
- Joined: Mon Nov 18, 2019 11:11 am
Wed Mar 03, 2021 8:42 am
Hi,
Welcome to StarWind forum. StarWind iSCSI accelerator load-balances iSCSI sessions (you will need to reconnect those), meaning that it will not utilize ROCE capabilities.
Cheers,
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mattaw
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Tue Mar 02, 2021 6:13 pm
Wed Mar 03, 2021 7:31 pm
I am so sorry, yaroslav, that I made a mistake in my previous post and took up your time. I was trying to ask about your NVMe-oF initiator, NOT your iSCSI Accelerator.
So my two questions are:
- Can the NVMe-oF initiator work with the older Connectx-3 ROCEv1
- Does the NVMe-oF require the use of Windows 10 Pro for Workstations or might it work with Windows 10 Pro (Pro Workstation needed to use SMB Direct w. RDMA)
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mattaw
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Tue Mar 02, 2021 6:13 pm
Fri Mar 05, 2021 5:20 am
After messing about with the undocumented ROCE protocols on the old Connectx-3 EN card, using ROCE V 1.25 on windows (?!? only mentioned occasionally in some Mellanox docs) I was able to get nd_rping / rping running between linux and windows.
I was then able to use Starwind rperf to run RDMA tests which passed.
I was then able to configure and setup a NVMe-oF share of a ZFS zvol on linux -> windows. Performance is out of this world vs. iSCSI. Max read and writes on iSCSI were about 1.9GB/s read and 900MB/s write using ATTO. They are now 2.5GB/s R and W. Not only that but the 4k r/w performance increased by 10x!
Incredible performance. I am going to write a short blog post on it with some benchmarks as soon as I stablize the setup properly between reboots.
contact us if assistance is required.