Stuff to think about: Bonding NICS doesn't give you the $aggregate bandwidth, you can simply load balance (with the right options) a total of $aggregate bandwidth. So, you might have two luns balancing their IO on an aggregate link with one luns traffic maxing out eth0 while the other on eth1 etc... MS doesn't recommend the use of the ini through a teamed adapter, yet recommend an MPIO config.
Your san 's config will obviously play a role in how you setup your host. As an example, I am building a Solaris target with ZFS under iSCSI for a pair of ESXi servers. ESXi has some cool new MP features that lacked before 4.0 so the target will have multiple interfaces not trunked and between splitting up luns and balancing IO through different NICs and switches, it _should_ work :) If the host is performing all the IO for many guests through its management interfaces (this so depends on your topology) you might be trying to squeeze the IO of many guests through to small an interface. You might consider using an ini inside a guest as well on its data volume. Only you will know this and you'll need to do some testing. WRT to flow control and jumbo's, that's highly specific to your nics and switches, don't assume enabling it will help. From what I have learned on the IET (target software) list, in reality its more common for that to impede performance than help currently. FWIW, I am sending this email from a WinXP guest next to three Windows 2008x64 Servers, a Freebsd server, a RHEL 5 Server and a Solaris Server all with rdm luns mapped via iSCSI on a shitty ML350G5 SATA server through a single gig nic. I wouldn't use it for too much more than the 6 users it caters to... jlc From: winsysadmin [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 2:05 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: MS iSCSI Target NIC Config I'm planning on using the MS iSCSI Target software on a Windows Server as VM guest storage (VHD's) for about 4 Hyper-V hosts in my test environment. I'm wondering what is the best NIC configuration on the iSCSI target for best performance of the iSCSI traffic. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
