Hardware for best performance

My Hyper V server has 2 network cards in use. One card acts as the normal network card that links the server to my lan. The other is the one for Hyper V. (creates a virtual switch and lan connection for my VMs).

I have another server that has two network cards in it that I plan on using as my SAN (Have OPEN-E DSS V6 Lite booting from 4GB USB Stick). I want to take all my VHDs and create fixed sized disks on this SAN.

Does my Hyper V server need another network card for dedicated iscsi transmissions?

Does the SAN use one network card to connect to the LAN and another for dedicated ISCSI connections?

And should I use a seperate switch (not connected to my lan) just to connect the ISCSI dedicated card in the storage server - to a 3rd network card (making that the 3rd network card in my hyper v server) in the Hyper V server for dedicated ISCSI.

so it looks like this



STORAGE SERVER ******* Switch*******Hyper V server
* * *
* * *
* * *
************LAN SWITCH***************

Each star represents a connection from a network card. 3 connections in Hyper V server and 2 from data server.

Or is there just a white paper or socuments that can help me with this?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by diablo45

My Hyper V server has 2 network cards in use. One card acts as the normal network card that links the server to my lan. The other is the one for Hyper V. (creates a virtual switch and lan connection for my VMs).

I have another server that has two network cards in it that I plan on using as my SAN (Have OPEN-E DSS V6 Lite booting from 4GB USB Stick). I want to take all my VHDs and create fixed sized disks on this SAN.

Does my Hyper V server need another network card for dedicated iscsi transmissions?

Does the SAN use one network card to connect to the LAN and another for dedicated ISCSI connections?

And should I use a seperate switch (not connected to my lan) just to connect the ISCSI dedicated card in the storage server - to a 3rd network card (making that the 3rd network card in my hyper v server) in the Hyper V server for dedicated ISCSI.

so it looks like this



STORAGE SERVER ******* Switch*******Hyper V server
* ----------------------------------------------* *
* ----------------------------------------------* *
* --------------------------------------------- * *
************LAN SWITCH***************

Each star represents a connection from a network card. 3 connections in Hyper V server and 2 from data server.

Or is there just a white paper or socuments that can help me with this?

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forget about the dashes they are just there to keep the stars from bunching together

Also what about setting up the network cards? What protocals should be enabled, jumbo frames, tcp/ip, etc...

If I need a switch what should I look for when i buy one to make sure it is compatible.

That is too difficult to answer for me. Is there anybody can help?

I don't quite understand your diagram, but if your base question is:

Should I dedicate a NIC for iSCSI traffic

Then the answer is YES.

Many have even dedicated physical switches (such as myself) for iSCSI traffic. Jumbo frames helps, but is not mandatory.

Hey diablo 45

It hard to tell you what to use as each network is different.
best thing to do is to try different settings and run performance tests.

DSS Lite only supports only one NIC card. I would throw another NIC in your Server and get a point to point ethernet cable (not using switch) with the 3rd NIC of your server and the NIC of the DSS Lite server. Turn on Jumbo frames on the DSS site and enable them on the server side ethernet card as well.

I wound up creating a private network.
One Nic in my DSS V6 server. Turned on Jumbo frames (looked under knowledge base to find instructions) Used a static

Attached a single Gigabit Switch. (The switch needs no programming. Supports Jumbo Frames)

One Nic in my server that has the Microsoft initiator Software. Turned on Jumbo Frames.

Gave each Nic a unique static IP and the same subnet. Seems to work. However, I am not sure how to test performance.

Look at IOmeter... Mount the lun on the initiator and test...