Install Guide

26 Best Practices for Sharing an iSCSI SAN Infrastructure with Dell PS Series and SC Series Storage using VMware vSphere
Hosts | 2015-A-BP-INF
IOPS, latency measured in milliseconds (ms), throughput measured in megabytes per second (MBPS),
retransmits (an indicator of network congestion), and other statistics (such as switch packet drops, discards,
and pause frames) were collected from host, switch, and storage ports. These parameters were carefully
analyzed to ensure that the host and iSCSI SAN network performance were not adversely impacted with both
PS Series and SC Series storage being accessed simultaneously.
6.1 Test environment
The test environment consisted of the following:
 Two Dell PowerEdge™ R620 servers running vSphere 6.0
 Three Dell PS6210 arrays (72 x 15K disks)
 Two Dell SC8000 storage controllers with three Dell SC220 enclosures (72 x 15K disks)
One Windows Server
®
2008 R2 guest VM was created on each vSphere host. PS Series MEM was installed
on each vSphere host and native VMware iSCSI Software Initiators were used to connect to PS Series and
SC Series volumes. Each vSphere host had 8 LUNs or volumes from PS Series arrays and 8 LUNs from SC
Series storage mapped for use. On each mapped LUN or volume, a VMware datastore was created. On each
of the datastores, as required by each testing scenario, a virtual disk was created and presented to the
Windows guest VM.
6.2 I/O performance testing
Testing scenarios for this paper are as follows:
 Baseline test: The vSphere hosts were connected to volumes on PS Series arrays only.
 Shared coexistence environment test: Both vSphere hosts were connected to both PS Series and SC
Series arrays to show the effects of adding SC Series storage to an existing PS Series SAN
environment, which includes hosts accessing both storage platforms.
 Dedicated coexistence environment test: One vSphere host was connected to volumes on PS Series
storage only, and the other vSphere host was connected to volumes on the SC Series storage only.
This test shows the effects of adding SC Series storage traffic to the existing PS Series iSCSI SAN
infrastructure only.
6.2.1 I/O performance results and analysis: shared hosts
Performance analysis in the shared-host environment is designed to show the impact to the PS Series
storage environment when SC Series storage is added to the existing environment, and existing hosts access
storage from both the PS Series and SC Series storage platforms over the same iSCSI adapters and iSCSI
infrastructure.