sbnetadmin
Cadet
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2012
- Messages
- 4
Hello All!
Overview of our setup
We have two ESXi 5 servers that connect over Gigabit NICs to a Gigabit switch which in-turn connects them to our FreeNAS 8 box via a Gigabit NIC.
What I'm trying to do and why?
We recently realised that our I/O speeds were being limited by the fact that we were maxing out the Gigabit NIC on the FreeNAS. In-turn each of the ESXi machines was only reaching about 50% utilisation of their NICs.
I have added in a new Gigabit NIC to my FreeNAS box and am working on figuring out a way to load balance between the two hosts.
Where am I stuck? (This is the part where you jump in :P)
So I've tried a couple of different ways to achieve this:
1) My first approach involved Link Aggregation but I figured that wouldn't work since I was using iSCSI.
2) I then tried adding the iSCSI disks to each ESXi host with a different IP. This worked splendidly i.e. each ESXi sent its traffic to a different NIC. However, the return traffic was coming back over the default NIC in-turn creating the bottle neck again.
I would really like to figure out a way through which both the ESXi hosts could connect to the FreeNAS box over their own individual NICs. Any help to get me here will be appreciated!
Thanks!
Overview of our setup
We have two ESXi 5 servers that connect over Gigabit NICs to a Gigabit switch which in-turn connects them to our FreeNAS 8 box via a Gigabit NIC.
What I'm trying to do and why?
We recently realised that our I/O speeds were being limited by the fact that we were maxing out the Gigabit NIC on the FreeNAS. In-turn each of the ESXi machines was only reaching about 50% utilisation of their NICs.
I have added in a new Gigabit NIC to my FreeNAS box and am working on figuring out a way to load balance between the two hosts.
Where am I stuck? (This is the part where you jump in :P)
So I've tried a couple of different ways to achieve this:
1) My first approach involved Link Aggregation but I figured that wouldn't work since I was using iSCSI.
2) I then tried adding the iSCSI disks to each ESXi host with a different IP. This worked splendidly i.e. each ESXi sent its traffic to a different NIC. However, the return traffic was coming back over the default NIC in-turn creating the bottle neck again.
I would really like to figure out a way through which both the ESXi hosts could connect to the FreeNAS box over their own individual NICs. Any help to get me here will be appreciated!
Thanks!