MPIO iSCSI w/ ESXI

[Ikyo]

I have a couple of datashares setup on a bare metal install (Dell R710).  I have the H700 raid array controlling the 6 2 TB drives.  They are in a RAID 5 configuration.  I have 3 nics on both the ESXI server and the Synology box (all Gig-E).  I can see it splitting the traffic between the 3 NICS, but the speed doesn't go up.  It seems to max out at the same amount 1 NIC would be.  Do I have something configured wrong or is this the best I will be able to do?

[XPEH]

This is the best you can do with ESXi. MPIO iSCSI limited with one conversation per time.

I have been fighting it on large vSphere servers for years and end up with 10Gb adapters to utilize the storage bandwidth fully.

If there are multiple simultaneous requests, you can see some utilization, but for something like migration or backup its a single NIC bandwidth only.

VMWare made some improvement for link aggregation with LACP and Distributed switch in the newer versions, but not for ISCSi.

 

 

[Ikyo]

I do agree that it sucks, but I am glad to know it wasn't me doing something wrong In your opiniion, could I run the R710 as an iSCSI data store for VMs and be okay with the 1Gb limitation or do I need to look at other options?  I am upgrading to a Dell R720, but it uses 2.5" drives.  So for me to rebuild the array, it would be pretty costly.  I was looking at like Open-E, but I am not sure it will do any better.

[mbu10]

well under 6.7 dunno if you can with 6.5 or below if you use NFS you can specify the ip's of the datastore/s

so i have a listed one with 10GBE in the esx and the dsm with  4 diffrent nics ip's and can get over 550MB a sec throughput

but this is with a Synology device, 

Have tried making a virtual dsm in esx with a nvme drive backing  and cannot get the same speed

but hey ho