Newbie To Starwind Have Some ?'s

zfrangi · Sat Jul 30, 2011 4:40 pm

Hey all Im a total newbie to starwind and I had some basic ?'s. My setup is a workstation I had lying around (HP 6000 Pro) with 8gb ram running 08r2. I have an external esata enclosure attached to it running raid 10 with a total of 4 2TB drives in it. The workstation starwind is running on has more than one nic in it. Can starwind take advantage of the extra nic? Are there any performance benefits to it?

I was reading through the help guide and there are some recommended registry tweaks for ISCSI protocol on the starwind box however I cant seem to find the reg entries...should I just create them? Im running vmware essentials plus 4.1 with 1 host at the moment. The switch does have jumbo frames enabled and I have enabled the jumbo frames on the nic for starwind. Are there any tweaks that needs to be done on the vmware side?

I was able to setup and iscsi target and create a datastore on the vmware side. Im not 100% sure the performance is what its supposed to be. Reason being is I shut down a vm and moved the disk to the iscsi target and it seemed to take a while.

Im totally new to this stuff so im not sure how it should perform and behave.

Thanks in advance....

zack

Sun Jul 31, 2011 10:28 pm

1) Yes, configure MPIO on your initiator and StarWind would definitely take care of extra NICs.

2) If you cannot find them then you do something wrong. Also make sure your OS and manual match. Registry settings for different Windows OSes are different.

There are A LOT of tweaks. Search this forum it's a very good source of answers on how to tweak VMware ESX to squeeze maximum performance from it.

3) You should have wire speed for iSCSI. If you don't then something is broken. Start from network itself (TCP/IP stack optimization).

zfrangi wrote:Hey all Im a total newbie to starwind and I had some basic ?'s. My setup is a workstation I had lying around (HP 6000 Pro) with 8gb ram running 08r2. I have an external esata enclosure attached to it running raid 10 with a total of 4 2TB drives in it. The workstation starwind is running on has more than one nic in it. Can starwind take advantage of the extra nic? Are there any performance benefits to it?

I was reading through the help guide and there are some recommended registry tweaks for ISCSI protocol on the starwind box however I cant seem to find the reg entries...should I just create them? Im running vmware essentials plus 4.1 with 1 host at the moment. The switch does have jumbo frames enabled and I have enabled the jumbo frames on the nic for starwind. Are there any tweaks that needs to be done on the vmware side?

I was able to setup and iscsi target and create a datastore on the vmware side. Im not 100% sure the performance is what its supposed to be. Reason being is I shut down a vm and moved the disk to the iscsi target and it seemed to take a while.

Im totally new to this stuff so im not sure how it should perform and behave.

Thanks in advance....

zack

zfrangi · Thu Aug 04, 2011 2:09 pm

How do you go about configuring MPIO? I managed to find a pdf on this site outlining the process however im not 100% sure on what needs to be done where.

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/iscsi-s ... ltipathing

Is this the correct document? The dcocument recommends configuring 2 nics on the stwarwind box with static ip's...thats fine i get that. Then it talks about creating a target and enabling clustering on the target. What If i already have a target? can i just enable that feature on my existing target or do i need to create a new one? Also from the looks of it appears that the the client server also needs to have 2 nics with static ip's assigned to them? Will this even help with througpout or is this just merely for failover/HA?

Regarding the reg entries I found this in the help doc's for starwind...

b) Change the following TCP parameters in the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]

1) GlobalMaxTcpWindowSize = 0x01400000 (DWORD)

2) TcpWindowSize = 0x01400000 (DWORD)

3) Tcp1323Opts = 3 (DWORD)

4) SackOpts = 1 (DWORD

I cant seem to find these entries at all on my starwind server. As far as the tweaks etc to vmware the documentationm seems to reference older versions of vmware (3.5 and 4.0) im running 4.1. The screenshots that are referenced from the vcenter console dont even exist on my setup.

Sorry for all the ?'s im really new to the storage world.

Thu Aug 04, 2011 2:29 pm

Is this the correct document? The dcocument recommends configuring 2 nics on the stwarwind box with static ip's...thats fine i get that. Then it talks about creating a target and enabling clustering on the target. What If i already have a target? can i just enable that feature on my existing target or do i need to create a new one? Also from the looks of it appears that the the client server also needs to have 2 nics with static ip's assigned to them? Will this even help with througpout or is this just merely for failover/HA?

The PDF is the correct one - if you want a real performance benefit from MPIO then you need to have 2 NICs on both sides, otherwise it will be just a minor performance increase whcih will be then bottlenecked by the single NIC port on the client.
If you've already created the target you will need to recreate it using the same image file, the data will not be lost.

Regarding the reg entries I found this in the help doc's for starwind...

These are not relevant for systems younger than 2003 R2, 2008 has it all redesigned so you only need to enable 9k Jumbo frames. The ESX settings shown can be a bit outdated, we're updating them but the general idea remains the same from 3.5 to vSphere 5.