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10 BP1038| Best Practices and Guidelines for Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7600 and FS7610 into an Existing SAN
5 Test topology and architecture
To study the performance impact of integrating an FS7600 or FS7610 into an existing environment,
Vdbench was used to generate a workload of both block and file I/O. Vdbench is an open-source I/O
workload generation tool that is available for download on SourceForge.net. Vdbench can be controlled
by a script, provides data verification, and allows flexible workload definitions for both block and file I/O.
Vdbench requires a JAVA runtime environment, so the Linux OpenJDK Runtime Environment was used in
these tests.
Vdbench is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdbench/.
Figure 1 Logical topology
For the workload generation clients, multiple VMware ESXi 5.01 servers were configured with Virtual
Machines (VMs) running Linux. The ESXi servers consisted of three Dell PowerEdge servers for the block
I/O clients and three for the file I/O clients. Three of the ESXi servers connected to the back-end SAN
switches (and to SAN storage) to support VMs that simulated block-attached servers, while the others
connected to the front-end client LAN switches to support VMs that simulated NAS-attached clients or
servers. For both the 1 Gb and 10 Gb test scenarios, there were 16 clients for block testing and 16 clients
for file tests. See Appendix B for details of each configuration.
On the SAN network, jumbo frames (MTU 9000) were configured. This is established best practice for
EqualLogic iSCSI SANs and is also required for the FS Series controllers. The standard MTU size of 1500