StarWind Software

I am mighty impressed with the Starwind tests I started doing last week. On an old server with RAID5 I was pushing 2000 IOPS and getting 10-40MBps via iSCSI when I used Windows iscsi initiator. I connected to the lun via my Windows 7 workstation and using IOMETER, was able to get those rates.

I have a dedicated 1GB switch for storage.

However, when I created a new lun and used vSphere to connect to the Starwind ISCSI using the same path I used before, rates were cut to 1/10th of the original. I tried via vmware software and hardware initiator. Both gave a max of 300 iops (but an average of <100) and a throughput of 1-1.5MBps.

I am sure it's something in my config. Do you have any ideas on what I may have missed or at least a starting point for my troubleshooting efforts?

Thanks!

Both system numbers suck. Anything lower then wire speed is not normal. Check this forum to start with network tuning, local I/O tests and VMware optimized IOPS settings. Topic has been discussed millions of times. If you'd still experience the issue after all we'd be happy to help however.

Just to follow up, I tested the network and it is working good.

What made it work great in my estimation was I took it off a VMware hardware iscsi and moved it to VMware's software initiator. Now it gets 15,500 iops and 60MB/s write speed. That seems great for this old server bought in 2004.

Any ideas on why the hardware initiator would perform so much worse as compared to the software?

IMHO your iSCSI HBA is powered by some old 200MHz offload processor with a 2006 or so dated firmware. And your multi-core and multu-GHz CPU runs circles around it... However I'd address the same question to your HBA vendor

if you use MPIO RR with starwind just set RR to 1IOPS instead of default 1000IOPS and you`ll see the same exact seems you get with windows initiator.

Thanks, I will give it a try

how many nics you use with Starwind for ISCSI traffic ? Are you using ESX5 or 4 ? I can give you some CLI to set that.. I beleive the forum has some command on ESX 4

I am running ESXi 5 with 2 hosts and 2 nics on each host.

Please see this : http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... 95-30.html

You`ll see what a huge difference made RR to IOPS1 instead of default VMware IOPS 1000.

I`ll try to get you the commands tonight on how to change the RR IOPS on ESX5

Thanks, but you don't have to write up scripts if you don't want to. I am in a small environment and can manually do the config.

Good! Please change your config and let us know did it work or not. Thanks!

BradI wrote:Thanks, but you don't have to write up scripts if you don't want to. I am in a small environment and can manually do the config.

These are some of very useful commands on Vsphere 5 to set MPIO RR to change every 1 iop. Now you can play and increase from 1 to 3 , 6 and 9 if you think 1 it`s too much. I left it to 1 as I got my 99% network card full utilazation on 4 nics so I did not bother to try with other numbers.

Please change the device UUID to match your LUN.

esxcli storage core device list

esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig get -d eui.b4e0d749d45bcd47

esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -I 1 -t iops -d eui.b4e0d749d45bcd47

Thank you for your valuable input! Hope OP would manage to have everything up and running.

georgep wrote:These are some of very useful commands on Vsphere 5 to set MPIO RR to change every 1 iop. Now you can play and increase from 1 to 3 , 6 and 9 if you think 1 it`s too much. I left it to 1 as I got my 99% network card full utilazation on 4 nics so I did not bother to try with other numbers.

Please change the device UUID to match your LUN.

esxcli storage core device list

esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig get -d eui.b4e0d749d45bcd47

esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -I 1 -t iops -d eui.b4e0d749d45bcd47