Re: [Xen-users] iscsi vs nfs for xen VMs

[Bart Coninckx <bart.coninckx@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 01/29/11 16:09, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 09:35:38AM +0100, Adi Kriegisch wrote:
>   
>> Hi!
>>
>>     
>>>> iSCSI tipically has a quite big overhead due to the protocol, FC, SAS,
>>>> native infiniband, AoE have very low overhead.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> For iSCSI vs AoE, that isn't as true as you might think. TCP offload can
>>> take care of a lot of the overhead. Any server class network adapter
>>> these days should allow you to send 60kb packets to the network adapter
>>> and it will take care of the segmentation, while AoE would be limited to
>>> MTU sized packets. With AoE you need to checksum every packet yourself
>>> while with iSCSI it is taken care of by the network adapter.
>>>       
>> What AoE actually does is sending a frame per block. Block size is 4K -- so
>> no need for fragmentation. The overhead is pretty low, because we're
>> talking about Ethernet frames.
>> Most iSCSI issues I have seen are with reordering of packages due to
>> transmission across several interfaces. So what most people recommend is to
>> keep the number of interfaces to two. To keep performance up this means you
>> have to use 10G, FC or similar which is quite expensive -- especially if
>> you'd like to have a HA SAN network (HSRP and stuff like that is required).
>>
>> AoE does not suffer from those issues: Using 6 GBit interfaces is no
>> problem at all, load balancing will happen automatically, as the load is
>> distributed equally across all available interfaces. HA is very simple:
>> just use two switches and connect one half of the interfaces to one switch
>> and the other half to the other switch. (It is recommended to use switches
>> that can do jumbo frames and flow control)
>> IMHO most of the current recommendations and practises surrounding iSCSI
>> are there to overcome the shortcomings of the protocol. AoE is way more
>> robust and easier to handle.
>>
>>     
> iSCSI does not have problems using multiple gige interfaces.
> Just setup multipathing properly.
>
> -- Pasi
>
>
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>   

On this subject: am using multipathing to iSCSI too, hoping to have
aggregated speed on top of path redundancy but the speed seems not to
surpass the one of a single interface.

Is anyone successful at doing this?


Cheers,

B.


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