WAAS Port Channel Configuration

[PETER GEHRMANN]

In the recent weeks we got some reports that CIFS writing performance to NETAPP OnTap 7.3 filer was degraded for WAAS accelerated connections.  NETAPP OnTAP 7.2  and native Microsoft filers were running fine. In our Testlab we could correlate this issue with the port channel setup on  our WAAS devices. With round robin (standard setting) the CIFS writing perforamce was poor. By switching  the port channel loadbalancing to src-dst-ip-port the performance was excellent.

Is there any known best practices recommendation for port channel configuration on WAAS  devices?

Many thanks in advance, Peter.

[jomerril]

The best practice depends on your network. Most deployments are fine with the default round robin configuration for port channel on the WAE. But I have encountered some installations where the configuration had to be changed in order to avoid out of order packets causing slow performance (like, if there is a firewall between the WAE and the server).

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