iSCSI mount on Win2012R2 file server - speed expectations

[paulatmig]

So first off, the build (to get that out of the way):

• Supermicro 6027R-E1R12L
• Two E5-2620 CPUs
• 192Gb of ECC RAM
• vmdk zvol store: 8 800gb Intel S3700 SSDs in mirrored pairs (2x4) - essentially RAID10.
• Storage zvol: 12 2Tb WD Re SAS in mirrored pairs (2x6)
• Intel P3600 ZIL (I don't remember if I set that to sync for the storage dataset, but it's on for the VM store)
• two Chelsio 10Gb nics
• no L2ARC

Our environment

• Medium sized office, about 80 users on Windows 7
• Brocade 6610 switches serving 10Gb to our servers, and 1Gb to our workstations - no jumbo frames, all CAT5e
• The vmdk iSCSI and storage iSCSI share connections between two Brocade switches, for failover purposes

Speed on the vmdk iSCSI mounts to our ESXi (5.5) hosts have been great, no problems at all there. Love it!

For our file storage, we've got a Windows 2012R2 VM on the aforementioned vmdk store. We then attached the storage volume via another network path (using the 2nd Chelsio NIC) to our ESXi hosts, and used Windows built-in iSCSI utility to mount that storage. That went smoothly and all is well.

At this point we're seeing about 18-22mb SMB transfers - at least write, I haven't tested read - from Windows clients on the network to shares on that Windows file server VM. Not bad, that's about what they're used to from our old NetApp SMB shares. These files are office documents, AutoCAD files, InDesign, ArcGIS, etc. - lots of smallish files (1mb - 300mb)

Most of the posts I've read out there when it comes to FreeNAS iSCSI with Windows is with HyperV, so I'm hunting around seeing if anyone else does something what we're doing.

So my questions would be...
Does that sound like performance we should expect?
Are there tweaks to the vmxnet3 drivers we should consider on the Win2012 VM?
Am I missing any points that I should be investigating into further?

Thanks in advance!

 

[dlavigne]

Were you able to find some answers to your questions?

 

[jgreco]

That's not outside the realm of possibility. That intermediate step of a Windows VM for file storage probably isn't helping you, and for writes, especially if you're using a SLOG, you've built a scenario where things aren't operating as quickly as they might.

But I'd expect that you'd be seeing more than 18-22 megabits per second. Did you perhaps mean 18-22 megaBYTES per second? Please note that "mb" is a poor abbreviation that could mean megabytes (quantity), megabits (speed), or motherboard. You yourself appear to use it two different ways in the same paragraph.

So please explain to us what the purpose of the Windows VM for file storage is.