We will have the list ready in July as we are still working on many other issues. Mainly new iSCSI target (SCST), Persistent Reservations for Win. 2008, NDMP ver. 4 and new GUI.
I have upgraded to vSphere 4 and I am currently running with 4 x ESXi 4 servers and 2 x Dell 2950 w/ DSS v 6. The volumes are sync replicated with iscsi failover. There have been no issues so far, but I haven't migrated all the machines (just a few) over to the DSS SAN. Once everything is migrated, I will let it run and send the logs.
Todd - Are you anticipating a July release of v. 6? I just want to ask (one more time) before I move production data on it :-)
Also - as far as my iscsi config, should I use SCST instead of IETD? If the volumes are setup with File I/O and initialized, should I also configure in the console, tuning, to use File I/O with iscsi? Just wanted to make sure...
Thanks for testing this for our engineers as we have not had the time and are pushing the final release for the first or second week of July - without fail!
I would use the SCST (Default in DSS V6) and with File IO. If you create them in begging you should not have to switch them and if possible do the initialization in the begging as well.
Though you can switch in the tuning console, I like to get it all done before you do replications and other function.
SCST is pretty sweet. I'm on the SCST mailing list, and there are new features all the time, with excellent performance on the basic iSCSI stuff.
A nice thing about SCST is that it supports exporting devices using:
iSCSI, of course
Fibre Channel (even support for 8Gbps)
SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP), a very low latency iSCSI-like connection using Infiniband (which has 40Gbps over a single connection), which is an inexpensive interconnect that almost all the fastest supercomputers use
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
Parallel SCSI (!)
SAS (even the new 6Gbps cards)
Also, you can use file-io, block-io, or even just pass-through (for sharing old Magneto-Optical or Tape systems over your network of choice).
Open-E doesn't support all of these interfaces, yet, but if enough people would use a given feature, I'm sure they'll get around to implementing it.
I have roughly 40 virtual machines that are (currently) storage v-motioning to a DSS v 6 cluster in vSphere 4. So far no issues. I am using the SCST and file i/o with jumbo frames enabled on the sync interface (crossover cable). They will continue to migrate overnight (gotta love task scheduling). I will update everyone with my experiences.
Just a quick note...the virtual machines are being migrated from an Openfiler system. The connection was lost for some reason to the OF system and I had to reload the iscsi service to bring back my VM's on OF. The VM's already migrated to Open-E were the only ones that didn't drop :-) So far so good...
Todd -
I have been experiencing some strange performance problems in the v6 beta cluster/failover setup I have. They are both Dell PE2950's with 2 PERC controlelrs and an MD1000 attached.
I am including a link to download the logs for both servers as well as a visio drawing of what I have setup (I could type it all out, but I work better with pictures ). What I am seeing is very sluggish virtual machines at no specific time or reason during the day. Currently I have 4 x ESXi 4 (vSphere 4) which are Dell 1950's with 4 NICS (2 for iscsi vmotion, and 2 for data). Each ESX server has roughly 6-7 virtual machines running on it. There is nothing very disk intensive at this time, just a Blackberry Enterprise server, Exchange front end, Windows update server, and other misc Windows 2003 and Linux servers and all SQL-based applications connect to a dedicated physical SQL 2005 server.
If you could take a peek at the logs and let me know if you see anything, that would be great. Maybe you can spot something I can't. The ESX servers are not dropping the iSCSI connections, the virtual machines just run very slow at times and sometimes temporarily freeze for a couple seconds.
If there is any other info you need, please let me know.