EqualLogic Customer POC Part 1
February 26th, 2010Onsite at a customer today installing an EqualLogic PS5000X Array for a Proof of Concept in a heavy CIFS/NFS environment.
For this POC we “front end” the EqualLogic Array with a single physical server running Windows Server 2008 R2 which will be doing the CIFS and NFS for the clients.
The HIT Kit and SAN HQ was installed on this server. (3) NICs setup for LAN with Teaming enabled. (3) NICs setup for SAN with standard MPIO using Least Queue Depth since this is a PS5000 which has (3) Gig Ethernet Ports for SAN. NOTE: We modified Max sessions per volume slice from the default of 2 to 3.
To make sure MPIO is using all (3) NICs for SAN we created a test Volume and used IOMeter which produced around 300MB/sec throughput to the EqualLogic Volume – Rock and Roll! We also confirmed connections in Group Manager and under the iSCSI Initiator.
Before testing we are allowing the EqualLogic Array to finish building/verifying the RAID and allowing the backup battery’s on the controllers to fully charge.
For the next week and a half the customer is going to heavily test this configuration and we will use SAN HQ to truly understand the performance metrics gathered during this POC.
Stay tuned for Part 2 in a couple weeks.
