Bad Performance - FN 9.1 iSCSI and VMWare ESX 5.1

[datamining]

@cyberjock,

thanks, ill try that command. as you can see in my post i have raid1 for the system and raid5 for the data and "little bit more" then 160GB SSD ;)
its also not a good idea to run a ssd on an storage server .. i think it will not hold for long :D

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, I wasn't sure where the line was for your data. But I think you got my point. SSDs are an option if you don't need to store large quantities of data.

 

[datamining]

The dd command is not working for me ... i don't have an UFS device mounted under /mnt

and suggestions for an speedtest?

 

[cyberjock]

The dd command is not working for me ... i don't have an UFS device mounted under /mnt

Then you'll have to point to whevever you want the test file to go.

 

[datamining]

Hey jock,

hm, i´m not able to do the speedtest .. only getting the error that the system is read only?

"/temp: Read-only file system"

on which folder/device can i do the test?

 

[datnus]

Try if they help http://fasterdata.es.net/host-tuning/freebsd/ and http://harryd71.blogspot.com/2008/10/tuning-freenas-zfs.html


FreeBSD's TCP has something called inflight limiting turned on by default. This is good for modem connections, but can be detrimental to TCP throughput in some high-speed situations. If you want "normal" TCP Reno-like behavior, set inflight.enable to 0.
By default, FreeBSD caches connection details such as the slow start threshold and the congestion windows size from the previous connection to the same host for 1 hour. While this is a good idea for a web server, it makes it hard to do network throughput testing, as 1 large congestion event will throttle performance for the next hour. To reduce this effect, set hostcache.expire to 1.

 

[datnus]

Hey jock,

hm, i´m not able to do the speedtest .. only getting the error that the system is read only?

"/temp: Read-only file system"

on which folder/device can i do the test?

Should be under /mnt/somedataset
/ should be readonly

 

[datnus]

Or try thishttp://www.mamisano.com/2009/10/28/freenas-tuning-for-better-performance/

 

[datnus]

Give up. :(

 

[datnus]

A wild guest, if we do a dd on FreeNAS directly, it may be more sequential than when we do a dd on VM (aka writing into a part of vmdk files)

If the write to vmdk file via iSCSI is treated as random, 60 MBps ~ 60 000 KBps ~ 7500 IOPS of 8KB which is reasonable.
It may explain why Windows writes (more sequentially) to iSCSI is faster than ESXi writes to iSCSI.
Just a hypothesis.

 

[zambanini]

if is just the vsphere/esx iscsi connection, which is slow..there might be help.

use mpio. 2 vmnics, differen ip ranges. freenas also needs different ips on multiple nics.
set both IO paths to active and random.

now you only set the mpio switch counter on esx, use your own storage apth (the part with naa......)
esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -d naa.600c0ff000127432c0a3245201000000 -t iops -I 1

default is 1000, means that vsphere will use the other nics only if more then 1000 IOs are used.

 

[datnus]

if is just the vsphere/esx iscsi connection, which is slow..there might be help.

use mpio. 2 vmnics, differen ip ranges. freenas also needs different ips on multiple nics.
set both IO paths to active and random.

now you only set the mpio switch counter on esx, use your own storage apth (the part with naa......)
esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -d naa.600c0ff000127432c0a3245201000000 -t iops -I 1

default is 1000, means that vsphere will use the other nics only if more then 1000 IOs are used.

I did all. It doesn't help much.
I set the max dev pending to 32. It helps a little as my HDD can push up to 32-64 IO pending.