OK. So I have this small shop. We have run vSphere on some desktop machines with Openfiler for years without issue. However, it is time to upgrade and while we would happily continue with Openfiler, we can't as you can no longer find motherboards that it will run on.
Anyway...
Looking for replacements.
First thing we wanted to know was, how much faster can our disks run, if we go to 10gb. So, we built a 2019 server and enabled iSCSI on it. Put in a SSD drive. Connected it to one of our 6.7 hosts and blah. I would say it runs about the same as our Openfiler. Actually a little worse.
Some more details....
We have a 10g switch. We put a 10g Nic in one of our hosts. We have a 10g Nic in the physical machine running 2019. We have not enabled Jumboframes. We did validate the speed via command line. We aren't looking for perfection, we just want to know that there is an improvement worth having if we go to 10g.
I realize that 2019 isn't a supported platform for iSCSI and VMware. Then again, neither is Openfiler.
So everything works, it just isn't very fast. I did some reading online and saw some that say go to advanced setting of the NIC and disable all the offloading of anything. Did that. I disabled Flow Control. Nothing. I increased the transmit and Receive buffers. It did make a change, we see really fast speeds like a few hundred mb for a few seconds but it quickly dies back down to around 30 - 40 MB p/s. Openfiler does a real solid 100 - 110 MB on a gb network. I would expect twice that on a 10g with little or no other change to the system.
That the trns and rev buffer increased gives us those fast speed for a few seconds I think is a good indication of the issue. I am just not sure what. Is there something about the host that is limiting us and as soon as the buffers fill it slows down. Doesn't seem very likely. What setting in the host could limit the disk speed?
The SSD in the 2019 server is fast. I can copy a file to the same location on the drive in less than 5 sec that is over 5g in size.
Trying to think of any other details.....
Nothing else comes to mind.
Thoughts?