Question about Best Practice Active-Active

[nova17.de]

Hello Todd,
I use MPIO for the VIP NICs - I only use a balance-rr Bond for the Storage Replication NICs:

4 NICs with VIPs presenting iSCSI -- VMware/Win2008 connected with MPIO
3 NICs as balance-rr bond for Storage Replication -- all cables connected directly 1:1 without a Switch inbetween.


About your iSCSI Target Options: At the moment we're running ESX4 but we're planning the upgrade to V5.x. Are these settings optimized for VMware in general?



Hello Alex,
yes I use the Open-E only as a big box, same iSCSI configuration on each side.



Thank you.
Bye, Manuel

[To-M]

I would still set these settings for the ESX 4.x as well.

[nova17.de]

Hi Todd,

I changed the values. Can you explain in in 2-3 short words what these settings do?
Or how much this will improve the performance?

Thank you
Manuel

[To-M]

These are the recommended VMware iSCSI target settings, the performance increase is very difficult to give an exact number but if you test with the defaults to these settings you should see an increase.

[Toni Bizjak]

...not to open new thread:

We are planning to combine two separate DSS7 iSCSI targets:
- one for VMWare ESXi initiators with parameters (recomended above)
maxRecvDataSegmentLen=262144
MaxBurstLength= 1048576
Maxxmitdatasegment=262144
FirstBurstLength=65536
DataDigest=None
maxoutstandingr2t=8
InitialR2T=No
ImmediateData=Yes
headerDigest=None
(deprecated)Wthreads=8

- and another one for native Win initiators (cluster of 2x Server2008R2)

Is it better to use default parameters on Win and adjust particular target on DSS7?
DelayBetweenReconnect=5
EnableNOPOut=0
ErrorRecoveryLevel=2
FirstBurstLength=#00010000=65536
ImmediateData=1
InitialR2T=0
IPSecConfigTimeout=#0000003c=60
LinkDownTime=#0000000f=15
MaxBurstLength=#00040000=262144
MaxConnectionRetries=#ffffffff
MaxPendingRequests=#000000ff
MaxRecvDataSegmentLength=#00010000=65536
MaxRequestHoldTime=#0000003c=60
MaxTransferLength=#00040000=262144
NetworkReadyRetryCount=#0000000a=10
PortalRetryCount=#00000005=5
SrbTimeoutDelta=#0000000f=15
TCPConnectTime=#0000000f=15
TCPDisconnectTime=#0000000f=15
WMIRequestTimeout=#0000001e=30

or adjust "VMWare recomend" parameters to Windows iSCSI initiator?

Thank you for the answer!
Toni

[Gr-R]

If you change target values, you will also need to adjust windows initiator.

[gharding]

Why not create multiple iscsi targets, then the targets for windows initiator set them according the windows settings and the targets for vmware set them to match vmware. The settings in open-e are per target and not global I believe