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BP1024 Scaling and Best Practices for Virtual Workload Environments with the FS7500 22
Figure 15 Utilization of multiple IPs and datastores to same NFS file system
It must be noted that the workload on ESXi hosts should be reasonably uniform over all the datastores
to get optimal throughput and utilization of all host side and storage side NICs. This is because we
distributed datastore mounts across different target virtual IP addresses which are mapped to different
host NICs and target NICs based on load balancing schemes on the host, target, and network.
For tests and results, refer to section 3.4.2. When using additional Virtual IP address on the FS7500 to
connect to a new datastore, we saw an increase in throughput measured.
3.4.4 Number of ESXi hosts
Better utilization of FS7500 client network can be realized if we increase the number of ESXi hosts
accessing the file storage, especially in the case of read I/O workloads from hosts. This is due to the
lack of native multipathing options for NFS in ESX. Multiple ESX hosts maximize throughput utilization
when they get load balanced across the FS7500 appliance NICs.
As seen earlier, one host can have only one vmknic port resulting in only one source IP address per
host for the FS7500 target controller. As we add hosts, more host IP addresses are available as
destinations ports for the FS7500 target controller during read I/O scenarios resulting in utilization of
all or more FS7500 client NIC ports. This increases the overall effective network throughput during
read I/O scenarios. This is shown in Figure 16.
For write I/O, the ESXi host vSwitch load balancing policy improves the network throughput by
spreading data across multiple host NICs to the FS7500 target controller as described in earlier
sections.