Hi There,
Over the last couple of months we have been experiencing extreme performance issues with our SAN and iSCSI network to the point where we have to shut down all connecting systems and bring them back up 1 by 1 for the issue to go away. When the problem occurs all running VM’s on both VMware and Citrix XenDesktop become either extremely slow or non-responsive and the ESX/Xen hosts stop seeing the iSCSI storage and our Exchange servers will take the storage groups off line since it cannot see the iSCSI storage.
A quick overview of our setup is as follows.
Dell EqualLogic 4 members containing 3 x PS5000 (Model 70-0115, 2 x 70-0111) and 1 x PS6000 (70-0202) connecting to 2 x Cisco 2960S running OS 12.2. All ports on the SAN are set at 9000 MTU and all ports on the switches are set to 9000 MTU for jumbo frames.
In to these to switches the following are connected – the switches have been setup as follows http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps6021/white_paper_c11-563477.html.
VMware 4 vSphere running on HP ProLiant DL585 G5's with 4x4core AMD 2.2Ghz processors and 70Gb of memory. VMware connects to the SAN using a QLE406xc iSCSI HBA and set at 9000 MTU
XenDesktop 4 running on a HP blade system C7000 with BL560. using a mixture of NetXtreme II BCM57711E 10 Gigabit PCIe and 82571EB Quad port Mezz card to connect to the SAN, the MTU is currently left at the standard MTU size as XenDesktop 4 does not fully support jumbo frames.
Exchange 2003 cluster. Exchange connects to the SAN using a QLA4052C and the MTU is set to 9000 MTU.
The iSCSI network is currently managed by a 3rd party and as of yet they have not been able to give us solution to this on-going problem.
Please don’t hesitate to ask for more information as I would like to get to the bottom of this ASAP.
thanks
