iSCSI HBA for C6100 - recommendations

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nev_neo

Active Member
Jul 31, 2013
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Hey,
I just bought 2 C6100's from ebay based on what I have read on the forums.
I was wondering if you have any recommendations for 1GB iSCSI network cards that would fit comfortably in the C6100's ?
Was looking to hook these up to a NAS/SAN and run VMs off them.
 

MiniKnight

Well-Known Member
Mar 30, 2012
3,072
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NYC
Being clear, are you thinking of a fiber or copper HBA? Any reason not to just use a standard Intel NIC? Also, have you given any thought to Infiniband?
 

RimBlock

Active Member
Sep 18, 2011
837
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Singapore
Being clear, are you thinking of a fiber or copper HBA? Any reason not to just use a standard Intel NIC? Also, have you given any thought to Infiniband?
Agree with Miniknight, the main network ports on the C6100 can be turned on to iSCSI via the bios.

What are you trying to get out of having a separate HBA ?.

RB
 

nev_neo

Active Member
Jul 31, 2013
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I guess Regular network cards would work as well.
I'm trying to have redundant paths and maximize bandwidth.
I'm still kinda new to iSCSI and this will be my first time i'd be using it. I've been using Fiber to connect to our old EMC CX500, but for this deployment we're looking to move to iscsi with ESXi.
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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ISCSI is pretty cool for slow and reliable. Nothing wrong with 2 gigabit in round robin. just as good as 2gb fiber channel.

Remember that "regular" nic's like nc360t are FAR less efficient than modern ones with offload similar to 10gbe (multi-core multi tx/rx queue). Congestion and latency are just the problem.

I found the lefthand's to be awesome. Other than the slow factor and congestion (nothing less than a 2910 procurve!).

It is quite cool to lose a complete lefthand node and have network raid keep on trucking, and vmotion is hella faster than svmotion!

Just remember it's slooooooow. linear is not bad at all but it's random iops versus linear.

But slow and reliable is not a bad thing for most folks!

I use my lefthand as regular servers now. they hit 500K on advanced disk iops esxi 5.1 - each.

3 units raid-5 with network raid-1 would hit maybe 50K - but you have 3 units and you have hella redundancy.

Price to pay for super uptime!

Solid as a rock too! nothing i've met is as solid as lefthand for iscsi. Plus the VSA can really extend your power.

now you fit those VSA's with 10gbe nic's and ssd and nice 10gb switches - wow.
 

BThunderW

Active Member
Jul 8, 2013
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Canada, eh?
www.copyerror.com
Agree with Miniknight, the main network ports on the C6100 can be turned on to iSCSI via the bios.

What are you trying to get out of having a separate HBA ?.

RB
Nice! I asked about this in another thread but had no response. So in essence with just a handful of 4-8GB iSCSI LUN's, I can have a completely diskless box. Sweet!
 

nev_neo

Active Member
Jul 31, 2013
157
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mrkrad, what nics would you suggest for these boxes ?
gb with iscsi offload ? or should I just use the onboard nics for iscsi and get cheap quad port nics for regular traffic ?