Been my experience that the networking stack in esxi is pretty darn good, but it's iscsi sw ini isn't all that hot. Allowing a guest to boot from and access a san via an iscsi initiator bypasses the need for any guest discs on a clustered filesystem which vmfs is.
Always been faster in the few setups I have worked on... Have a read here, great article: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/09/a-multivendor-post-on-using-iscsi-with-vmware-vsphere.html jlc From: Kim Longenbaugh [mailto:k...@colonialsavings.com] Sent: Monday, April 04, 2011 10:16 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: MS iSCSI initiators in VM guests Thanks to you and all who did or will reply.... What metrics did you use to determine the performance differences? Perfmon and disk queue length? R/W bytes per second? SANHQ? From: Steven M. Caesare [mailto:scaes...@caesare.com] Sent: Monday, April 04, 2011 11:12 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: MS iSCSI initiators in VM guests We've found significant performance differences in favor of MS's initiator for data drives connecting to our EQL boxes via 10Gb pipes. That's the method we are going with.. although I would like to ultimately figure out where the performance penalty is coming in to play... -sc From: Kim Longenbaugh [mailto:k...@colonialsavings.com] Sent: Monday, April 04, 2011 11:46 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: MS iSCSI initiators in VM guests I considered using an "OT" tag, but decided this is not OT for the list. We're having an often heated debate on how to attach data drives in Win2003/Win2008 guests in our new VM 4.1 environment. We use Dell Equallogic iSCSI attached SAN arrays. Some folks say it's best to attach all the drives, whether it's an OS volume (C:\) or data drives, through the Vmware ESX iSCSI initiators, which would force us to use VMFS partitions (having decided again RDMs or NFS partitions). There's also a group that says that only the c:\ drive should be attached using the Vmware ESX iSCSI initiators, and the guests should be attached with guest-based initiators, either the MS one, or the Equallogic-furnished initiator with its own specific DSM. Who uses which method, and what's your pros and cons for each? Thanks Kim ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
