Suggested configuration of NIC's please

[WarrenW]

Hi,
I am trialing the StarWind Native Save for Hyper-V on server 2012. I have the following hardware in the servers...
4 x 1Gb NIC on PCI card.
2 x 1Gb NIC built into the server chassis.
2 x 8Gb fiber channel HBA storage adapters (no SAN to connect them to though)
2 x 3.0Ghz Xeon QC CPU
48Gb RAM
1Tb of SSD drives for testing

I would like to know how to get the best possible performance. At this stage I have NIC teamed the 4 x 1Gb PCI ports for the sync channel and I am using one of the on baord 1Gb ports for heartbeat, the other for management. When setting up the HA disks under the StarWind software it performs a sync between the 2 servers. I am getting 120Kbps send and 112Kbps recieve on directly attached (no switch) cables between the server PCI cards. I feel this is too low.

Please assist.

[WarrenW]

After rebooting BOTH servers I achieved a near 1Gb throughput with the teamed nics when syncing. Can we get better performance with the 4x nics teamed or would it be better to team 2 pairs and have the sync down one pair and the heartbeat down the other?

[Anatoly (staff)]

Hello WarrenW,

First of all I`d recommended to stop using NIC teaming, and start to use RR NLB policy instead.
Here you can find interesting information about it:
http://communities.intel.com/thread/19600

Also I`d recomended you next: the sum of all iSCSI client datalink bandwidths should be not more then total bandwidth of SyncChannel.

I`d also likr to provide you with the recommended schema of environments topology:

[anton (staff)]

DO NOT use teamed NICs for anything. For client connections stick with MPIO and for sync channel leave them AS IS, StarWind will automatically split requests between multiple configured sync channels.

After rebooting BOTH servers I achieved a near 1Gb throughput with the teamed nics when syncing. Can we get better performance with the 4x nics teamed or would it be better to team 2 pairs and have the sync down one pair and the heartbeat down the other?

[WarrenW]

Great and thanks for the heads up on the nic teaming. I will remove it and study the RR document.

[Anatoly (staff)]

Keep us updated please - your feedback is really important for us.