Hardware ISCSI NIC Question

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DBayPlaya2k3

Member
Nov 9, 2012
72
4
8
Houston
(Mods Please feel free to move if this is the wrong forum to ask this question).

Hello,

I am currently in the process of trying to test ISCSI.

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My Setup:

1 ESX-I Host with LSI 9265-8I (20 TB of storage)

1 Synology DS1812 (32 TB of storage Raw)
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Currently I am using NFS to access the synology Box but I would like to test with Hardware ISCSI.

I have used vmware software ISCI before and was not hugly impressed.

Question: Will Hardware ISCI lead to better performance all things equal?


I am currently looking at some used QLogic Hardware ISCI cards on ebay for this.

Thanks
 

PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
3,184
1,545
113
It probably won't change your performance very much at all. Mostly, hardware support for iSCSI in the NIC has to do with diskless boot - the ability to have the iSCSI stack available before you have an OS running on the machine.

There isn't much hard-stuff to decode in the iSCSI protocol that would benefit from offload to the NIC. The benefit of doing it in the hardware isn't so much making it faster - it just keeps the load off the host CPU. But with current generation CPUs there isn't much load from iSCSI to get rid of.
 

DBayPlaya2k3

Member
Nov 9, 2012
72
4
8
Houston
It probably won't change your performance very much at all. Mostly, hardware support for iSCSI in the NIC has to do with diskless boot - the ability to have the iSCSI stack available before you have an OS running on the machine.

There isn't much hard-stuff to decode in the iSCSI protocol that would benefit from offload to the NIC. The benefit of doing it in the hardware isn't so much making it faster - it just keeps the load off the host CPU. But with current generation CPUs there isn't much load from iSCSI to get rid of.
Thanks you for that it makes sense.

Ok i think I will scrap that plan on make another thread on builing a good storage back end for my esxi host.

Thanks again