you may want to implement jumbo frames to your iSCSI backend…

Enable jumbo frames on your iSCSI target and switches then complete the following on the ESXi hosts (iSCSI initiators)…

This to list your current switch details and port group names…

esxcfg-vswitch -l

The follownig to allow jumbo frames onto your vswtich (insert your vSwich in following)

esxcfg-vswtich -m 9000 vSwitch0

Then delete and recreate your kernel port groups that you setup for iscsi, my commands looked like this… (repeat for each iscsi kernel port you have)

esxcfg-vmknic -d iSCSI-1

esxcfg-vmknic -i 10.0.0.101 -n 255.255.0.0 -m 9000 iSCSI-1

to confirm you have set the MTU (frame size) correctely, run the following….

esxcfg-vmknic -l

you should see your iSCSI kernel ports with a MTU of 9000 all going well.

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Create two virtual kernel switches, one called “iSCSI-1″ and the other called “iSCSI-2″ (and so on if you have more nics)

Then per kernel portgroup ensure that only one of the nics is active. For the “iSCSI-1″ portgroup configure it to override the virtual switch settings and move nic 0 to active and nic 1 to unused. For the “iSCSI-2″ portgroup configure it to override the virtual switch settings and move nic 1 to active and nic 0 to unused.

Now you have to run some esxcli commands to gel things together…. alt-f1 on the esxi console and type “unsupported” followed by your root password. The following is the command i have to run to get both my portgroups to work together on the iscsi hba….  (you can check your vmk number from the networking config screen)

esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk1 -d vmhba33
esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk2 -d vmhba33

For each target then change the path selection method to “round-robin”.

Go back to storage adapters and click “rescan”

If you want all future iSCSI targets to automatically use round-robin you must also run the following from commandline…   (this is for our HP Lefthand, your “storage array type” may be different. Its listed under your target details). Basically sets round robin as a default for this type of array. In general you should do this first before presenting any LUNs etc, else you may have to bounce your box.

esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp –satp VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA –psp VMW_PSP_RR

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http://download3.vmware.com/vdcos/demos/DVS_Demo_800×600.html

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I’ve got everything on a single partition (meh, i’m lazy). I’ve done various speed tests in the current setup (with all space allocated), but i thought i’d re-image onto a short stroke partition.

I only use about 150Gb of space on my main machine (most of my data is on another box), so i’m going to try creating a 200Gb partition to test if this provides any kind of performance boost.

So reducing my raid 0 from 750Gb to 214Gb, and here are the results…

Before with all 750Gb presented…

Same disks but short stroked to 214Gb….

Conclusion : Yip, seems like its worth it if you have the spare space. Average throughput is up by 10MB/s and seek has improved by almost a third loosing 4ms.

You will get even more of an improvement if you can use a smaller % of capacity per drive and / or more drives for your stripe.

Updated : 07/02/2010

btw – the above was without write-back cache enabled…. if i turned that on i got the following…

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Next delete isolinux.bin and rename isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg

Edit syslinux.cfg and append “usb” to the line starting with “append” … i.e. similar to this

append vmkboot.gz — vmkernel.gz — sys.vgz — cim.vgz — ienviron.tgz — image.tgz — install.tgz usb

Next grab the latest syslinux.exe (zip for windows) from here and run syslinux -s –ma <driveletter>:

Done.

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First download the .iso, then browse with winrar or similar. See if you can find the “big”.dd file this is the file we need.

i.e. the ESXi 4 file is called VMware-VMvisor-big-208167-x86_64.dd

Next grab WinImage and “restore image to physical harddrive” choose the .dd file the select your usb / flash drive.

Done.

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The steps…

1. Download and install the vMA from vmware – fire up the vm and setup the basic networking required
2. Create trusts within the vMA to each of the vmware hosts you wish to manage (sudo vifp addserver <server>)
3. Install HP Power Protector (linux agent) – you could substitute for your UPS client software
4. Modify the shutdown script (may differ per vendor) to shutdown the esxboxs- “SDScript” (hostops.pl)

The 1st step is easy enough. Find the download at vmware and install (Deploy OVF Template…)

Once up and running you need to create the trust between the vMA and your ESX hosts. Logon using vi-admin and your password. then;

sudo vifp addserver esxbox1 (you will be prompted for the hosts root password)

Do this for each box you wish the vMA to manage.

Once you have installed your UPS agent into the vMA (linux client should work without issue) the next step is to modify the shutdown script to do the work. Within the script you will need the following in it…

vifpinit esxbox1

This sets the context of vMA to this host. Note: the server should have been added as one of the managed

/usr/lib/vmware-vcli/apps/host/hostops.pl -operation shutdown -target_host esxbox1

Note: you need to use the actual name of the host and not its IP. You can get the exact name of the

The HP power protector agent script is located at /usr/local/DevMan/SDScript

If you want to ensure all your guests shutdown cleanly, enable “shutdown virtual machines on host shutdown”. Also note that if you shutdown the host that the vMA is running on it will kill the script. So shutdown the host that the vMA is running on last (remove vm from DRS)

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Grab SUNWiscsitgt via package manager.

enable the server via svcadm;

svcadm enable iscsitgt

create your zfs iscsi pool;  (this command will limit iscsi drive to 500GB in size)

zfs create -V 500G tank/iscsi

set isci on via zfs command;

zfs set shareiscsi=on tank/iscsi

check that target is up and running;

iscsitadm list target -v

Done. Should be able to connect via ip from another machine. I have not covered CHAP or any client side configuration. Assumed isolated LAN.

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Check it out here;

http://www.freenas.org/

I’m still using opensolaris though as i like running a few virtualbox machines on the same box.

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When i tried to import with zpool import -f tank the machine would lockup and reboot (panic).

The kernel panic;  (key line)

> genunix: [ID 361072 kern.notice] zfs: freeing free segment (offset=3540185931776 size=22528)

Nothing i could do would fix it… tried both of these options in the system file with no success;

set zfs:zfs_recover=1
set aok=1

After a quick email from a Sun Engineer, the zdb command line that fixed it;

zdb -e -bcsvL <poolname>

zdb is a read only diagnostic tool, but seemed to read through the sectors that had the corrupt data and fix things??  (not sure how a read only tool does that) – the run took well over 15hrs.

Updated: 20/10/2009

Apparently if you have set zfs:zfs_recover=1 in your system file the zdb command will operate in a different manner fixing the issues it encounters.

Remember to run a zpool scrub <poolname> if you are lucky enough to get it back online.

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