HP LeftHand SAN Solutions Support Document - Application Notes - Virtualization SAN - Performance

• Dedicate a separate IP subnet/VLAN for your iSCSI SAN.

• Use a secondary Gigabit Ethernet NIC in servers attached to the

Ethernet storage subnet for high availability and performance.

• If possible attach all modules and application servers to the same

Gigabit switches for the storage networking.

• Make sure all switch ports and Ethernet adapters are configured to

run at Full-duplex Gigabit speeds.

Disk Formatting Best Practices

• Use the default block size, or allocation unit size, unless a particular

application specifies an alternate size. Microsoft Exchange should be

on volumes formatted with a block size of 4096 bytes.

• Partitions should be created starting at sector 128 to align the offset to

64KB using Diskpar or Diskpart.

Storage Node Configuration Best Practices

• Bond networks interfaces for network redundancy and more

bandwidth using Adaptive Load Balancing (ALB).

• Use RAID level 5 or 10 for disk redundancy within storage modules.

• Enable SAN/iQ iSCSI Load Balancing on authentication groups for

Windows servers

• Install the DSM software driver to enable fault-tolerant paths to the

SAN modules while also increasing available bandwidth to the SAN

for maximum performance

Performance Test Environment for Realistic Application Benchmarks

Performance data was gathered using enterprise class servers with the

following attributes:

• 2.8GHz dual core Intel Xeon processor

• 4 gigabytes of RAM

• Dual gigabit Ethernet network adapters (bonded using balance ALB)

• All equipment connected to the same gigabit Ethernet switch