StarWind Software

Hey guys,
I've just started investigating MPIO with Starwind and haven't really seent he performance improvements I was hoping. It seems even with MPIO I can't get past 1gbps, even with multiple VMs!.

Config:
Starwind
win 2008 r2, 6x 3TB drives RAID 6 with SSD cache and 1GB write back on LSI card. 2x intel NIC for iSCSI, 9k jumbo frames. Raw performance:


Switch
Cisco SGE 2000 with jumbo frames enabled


Host
VMWare esxi 5 u1 on new Supermicro Xeon e5 system with dual intel NIC for iSCSI. Connects to single target on Starwind:







So here is my VM performance. Also in the 2nd picture see that the Starwind server is only using 50% of the bandwidth on each connection?




Any ideas?

1) Start with dumping your benchmark tool. Use Intel I/O Meter.

2) Please list StarWind config. How many nodes, device type, amount of write back cache allocated etc.

3) Please run I/O Meter against local storage and then again from a few VMs you're using to get combined numbers.

Have you set your IOPS=1?

Ara

I'm assuming that you mean Number of Outstanding IOps, correct? The value should be 32 or 64.

No I'm referring to the Round Robin policy in iSCSI initiator and settings IOPS=1, default is IOPS=1000.

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... ops#p12194

Anatoly (staff) wrote:I'm assuming that you mean Number of Outstanding IOps, correct? The value should be 32 or 64.

Oh! Good question, logicmate!

Zeon, would you be so kind to answer the question, and probably provide us the screenshot that would showed the value of the corresponding setting?

Thank you

Hey guys,
Thanks very much fort he advice so far. I have run some tests using IOmeter with the following settings:

size: 4096
% of size: 100%
% read: 67
% random: 100
delay: 0
burst: 1

This ran 4x tests. I have given the raw performance of the SAN, performance of 1 VM running the test before the IOPS=1, 2x VMs running IOmeter concurrently before the IOPS =1 and a test after changing the IOPS=1 for a single VM.

For random tests the performance drop because of iSCSI doesn't seem to be too huge. I'm wondering if I should use a different ICF for iometer to perhaps measure sequential read/write?

IOPS


Read Performance (MBps)



here are the starwind settings:



Write Performance(MBps)

Well, you still haven't mentioned the Number of Outstanding IOPS that you have used. As you can see in my post above I've recommended to use 32 or 64 value.