6500 and 4500 iSCSI

[mike-greene]

Hi,

Were in the process of building out a small data center.  At the core were going to be using either 6500's or 4500's depending on the sizing we deside on.

We're currently using SAN switches but in the future may want to move to an iSCSI solution.  My question is do newer 6500's and 4500's support iSCSI on a smaller scale?  I'm not an iSCSI expert but from what I can tell jumbo frames, disabling spanning-tree on iscsi ports and enabling flow control are whats needed for iSCSI attached devices.  I'm pretty certian that 6500's and 4500's can enable/disable these but am I missing anything?

Is anyone out there running iSCSI solutions on core 6500's or 4500's and does it perform well?

Thanks,

Mike

[Kris Vandecruys]

Hi Mike,

Since iSCSI is really a L7 protocol, any switch should support this, or not care about it at all.  What you summarized are all good best practices to optimize the performance of iSCSI.

1. jumbo frames is a bit of a given.  You can put a single 8k block of data in a single frame so that saves you some overhead. Be aware that if you plan to use larger blocksizes, Jumbo frames helps, but not as much.

2. I'm uncertain of what you mean with disabling spanning tree. The best practice would be to configure this port as an edge port (PortFast) but that goes for all hosts/leafnodes, not just iSCSI.

3. By flow control, do you mean PFC (Pause frames)?

HTH,

Kris