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BP1024 Scaling and Best Practices for Virtual Workload Environments with the FS7500 18
Figure 11 Throughput with single and multiple NAS file systems
We did not find a significant difference in throughput behavior in either case as seen in Figure 11. We
achieved close to line rate throughput in both cases. From a performance optimization standpoint, it
does not make a difference to deploy a single or multiple NAS file systems within the FS7500.
However, to enable ease of management for applications and infrastructure, we do recommend use
of multiple NAS file systems as required. This will not significantly impact the overall throughput
performance.
3.4.2 Number of host NICs connected
Increasing the number of physical uplink NICs associated with the host vSwitch improves network
throughput performance in terms I/O. This holds true only if multiple target NAS service IP addresses
are used to access the datastore and the IP hashing load balancing policy is used on the vSwitch.
IP hashing algorithm on the ESXi host vSwitch uses a different NIC to transfer data for each unique
target NAS service IP address. Therefore, adding NICs improves throughput by enabling more physical
NICs to be utilized on the host. We conducted a series of tests with different number of NIC uplinks to
the vSwitch. The number of uplinks was varied to up to eight. We simulated sequential read and write
I/O from a VM using Iometer. The vSwitch load balancing was set as IP hash-based load balancing. We
used a single NFS export from the FS7500 mounted as eight different datastores using up to eight
different NAS service IP addresses. We used the corresponding number of NAS service IP addresses to
mount new datastores as the number of NIC uplinks were varied on the vSwitch.
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Throughput (MBps)
Number of NAS file systems
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