NBD faster than SAN transport

[b.vanhaastrecht]

Hi,

I''m facing a weird SAN/NBD transport with a customer setup. I've not created a support ticket (yet).

Setup:
Three PS6110 Equallogic 10GbE nodes backed on a 10GbE infrastructure.
Two HP C7000 chassis with each two Virtual Connect mods connected with both 1x 10 GbE to same iSCSI infrastructure.
Each ESXi blade has a profile of 2x 5GbE for LAN, 2x 3GbE for iSCSI and 2x 2 GbE for vMotion.
The physical Veeam proxy&repository server is connected with 1x 10GbE to iSCSI, and one 1x 10GbE to the LAN.
The Veeam server is a Windows 2012 R2, MPIO installed, Equalogic DRM installed, MTU 9014, FlowControl enabled.

Test 1: SAN transport / 5.0 u1 ESXi blade / 5.0 u1 physical vcenter server:
Less then 4MB/s per vmdk. Overal job performance 50MB/s. (What we experiance is a very stuttering traffic flow when backup up thru SAN transport, it stalls, and receives some blocks, stalls ext... Overal performance of backup very poor. )

Test 2: NDB transport / 5.0 u1 ESXi blade / 5.0 u1 physical vcenter server:
50MB/s per vmdk and overal 300MB/s. (Much much better.)

Test 3: SAN transport / 5.5 u1 ESXi blade / 5.5 u1 VM vcenter server:
About 40MB/s per vmdk. Overal job performance 200MB/s. (Much better flow, but still not optimum.)

Test 4: NDB transport / 5.5 u1 ESXi blade / 5.5 u1 VM vcenter server:
25MB/s per vmdk and overal 120MB/s. (Worse than via SAN transport. )

As you may notice, in this situation on 5.0u1 the NDB has much better flow then SAN. In 5.5u1, SAN is better then NBD but not great. SAN transport is not new to me, but I'm absolutely in this. I think somethings not optimum in the iSCSI setup. Any recommendations?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Bastiaan,

Do you have the same bottleneck stats across all jobs? Also it's strange that backup job performance depends on the vCenter Server installation type, however It can easily be explained by the later version of vSphere Since you're using iSCSI Direct SAN access you may want to try to apply this setting, as it is also applicable to Windows 2012 Servers.

Thanks!

[foggy]

I would also play with MPIO settings: Equallogic HIT Kit and Direct SAN Access