IO Performance Tuning
Contents
My Setup
This testing was done with the following setup:
Windows 2008 R2
- four 10GbE ports
Quantastor
- four 10GbE ports
- LSI 9750-8i Controller
MPIO
LACP
Setup
Setting up LACP on the Quantastor side is very simple. First create a bonded group of Ethernet ports. This can be done by first navigating to the "Network Ports" tab under the "Storage System" section. Right click in the empty space under the network ports and select "Create Bonded Port". Assign the port the desired IP address and select the ports to be bonded. In our setup we bonded all four ports together. The last step is to right click on the storage system and select "Modify Storage System". At the very bottom under "Network Bonding Policy", select LACP. Everything is now setup for LACP on the Quantastor side.
Setting up LACP on the Windows side requires a little bit more effort.
Cautions with LACP
Be careful if you decide to use LACP. I would highly recommend first trying the MPIO setup like talked about above. After doing a performance run of MPIO, setup LACP and run the performance tests again. Doing this will allow you to have a target IO performance mark to try and meet. With our testing LACP seemed to be very sensitive to different filtering techniques that were allowed by the switch. Turning LACP on while leaving all of the default settings resulted in a large drop in IO performance. This will be different from switch to switch but a drop in performance by 80% (roughly what we saw) was discomforting. After some tweaking of the settings in the switch the performance became closer to what was seen with MPIO.
Jumbo Frames
Jumbo frames depending on the setup can have a large impact on the IO performance.
