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BP1024 Scaling and Best Practices for Virtual Workload Environments with the FS7500 19

Figure 12 Increase in write throughput with increase in number of NICs and Virtual IP addresses

With more NICs, we saw an increase in throughput measured. We tested configurations from one NIC

up to eight NICs on the ESX host. In the figure above, the addition of more than four NICs does not

improve performance significantly since the backend disk configuration was saturated, so the

throughput is shown for only up to four NICs. Generally the throughput obtained scaled with the

number of physical NICs as long as sufficient backend disk resources are provided.

3.4.3 NAS service IP addresses used to connect to the datastore

Using the maximum number of NAS service virtual IP addresses enables better network throughput

from the FS7500 to fit with the IP based load balancing policy on the ESXi host vSwitch. The FS7500

can be accessed using multiple virtual NAS service IP addresses. These can be assigned through group

manager. Eight and 16 virtual IP addresses are available with use of one (two controllers) and two (four

controllers) FS7500s respectively.

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Throughput MB/sec

Number of NICs used