Infiniband + iSER

[xy67]

I currently have two ESXi 6.0 hosts that connect to a Starwinds Virtual SAN iSCSI SAN that is running on Windows Server 2016 Datacenter in my lab. I'm using 8 x 1Gb NIC ports in the SAN for iSCSI/MPIO and have 4 x 1Gb NIC ports in each ESXi host. I direct connect the hosts to the SAN (ie: no Ethernet switch is used). The performance is good but I'd like to up my storage performance even more

I have just watched this Starwind Youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4fCeDrsSqc

(Accelerate your performance by deploying iSER to your StarWind infrastructure)

I am keen on replacing my 1Gb NICs in the SAN/hosts with 40Gb/s Infiniband cards but I have a few questions first:

1) Does Starwind Virtual SAN 8.0.9996.0 support iSER?

2) In the video it was mentioned that Mellanox cards are the only ones supported, which Mellanox cards are supported with Starwind that can use iSER and will work with ESXi 6.5?

3) The video also mentioned that ESXi 6.5 is the only version of ESXi that supports iSER so I'll be upgrading to that at the end of the month. So if I have ESXi 6.5, the correct Mellanox Infiniband cards and the correct version of Starwind Virtual SAN can I make use of iSER/RDMA for my storage between the ESXi hosts and SAN?

4) Can I use direct connect connections between the SAN and ESXi servers? (ie: no Infiniband switch)

5) Currently I use Veeam for backups and use "Direct SAN" for backups/restores which gives great performance but can I continue using this with an Infiniband/iSER setup?

Many thanks!

[Michael (staff)]

Hello xy67,
Please find below the answers to your questions:
1) StarWind Virtual SAN 8.0.9996.0 doesn't support iSER. It will be available in StarWind v8 R5 build as experimental feature;
2) You can use, for example, ConnectX®-3 network adapters - http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_d ... ro_en_card. Also it should work with ConnectX-3 Pro, ConnectX-4, ConnectX-4 Lx. Please note that currently iSER works only with a specific driver.
3) At this moment we checked iSER on ConnectX-3 and ConnectX-4 with RoCE v1/v2 and it works fine. Infiniband cards were not tested yet. Also, we face with PSOD issue: https://communities.vmware.com/message/2633851
4) Technically it should work, but I am not sure that will be no issues there.
5) Yes, that should work as before

[xy67]

Thats really helpful, thank you!

[Michael (staff)]

Let us know if you have any other questions.