Hi,
I'm trying to get some good iSCSI performance between my two nested ESXi VMs and my physical HP Microserver Gen8 running Windows Server 2012 R2.
Here's the current setup:
- 1 x Dell PowerEdge T710 ESXi host
- 1 x HP Microserver Gen8 (offering up iSCSI)
- Dell and HP hosts have 2 x Emulex OCe10102 10GbE card
- All 10GbE NICs are connected using a Force10 cable (basically a cross-over cable) as there are only two physical hosts
- 2 x nested ESXi VMs with eight NICs (2 x management, 2 x iSCSI, 1 x NFS, 3 x nested guest VM traffic)
- Promiscuous mode and forged transmits enabled on each port group that offers traffic to nested guests
- ESXi Mac Learning dvFilter VMware fling installed on host
- Chap is disabled
- Each iSCSI port group has one active adapter, the rest are unused
- All hosts and guests are running 5.5 U2 build 2718055
- HP storage box is running Windows Server 2012 R2
The nested VMs can see the iSCSI LUNs, create/browse datastores etc without issue. It's just the performance is terrible.
On the Dell host, I can copy a 5GB file to the iSCSI datastore and it takes about 4 minutes. From the nested ESXi guest that would take about 40.
Here's what I've tried:
- Changing the nested VMs NICs from E100 and E1000E, then again to VMXNET3.
- vSwitches and dvSwitches for the iSCSI NICs on the guests
- Setting the MTU to both 1500 and 9000 (currently it's back at 1500)
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Many thanks,
-Mark