Home Lab Advice (Teaming vs MPIO)

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nitrobass24

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - December 2009
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Hi All - I am in the process of migrating everything from Xenserver to Hyper-v 2012 R2.

Part of this will include the transition from NFS storage to iSCSI based storage.
Components
  • Storage: Synology NAS (iSCSI & NFS) w/ 2x 1GBe NICs (currently in LACP team)
  • Network: HP 1810g-24
  • Compute: 2 Nodes Xeon E3-1245L,16GB RAM, 2x GBe Nics

I have read that NIC teaming is not supported for iSCSI CSVs, but if I break the teams on the my nodes and synology then should I setup MPIO?

Ideally I would have separate subnets for iSCSI and do MPIO, but I have a single /24 at home and i host stuff on my synology that needs to be accessible from the primary network.

I kind of see three options
  1. Should I team the NICs on both the Syno and Compute Nodes?
  2. Should i team just the Syno and use 1 NIC on the compute nodes for storage and the other NIC for everything else?
  3. Other options?
 
1. If you're going iSCSI, no don't team, use MPIO.
2. No.
3. I'd just use both interfaces, yeah, you'll be passing iSCSI traffic over your home LAN, big deal. I've done this for years. Business network I would argue against, but at home you're fine. Other thing you could consider is just use one NIC in the syno for iscsi. MPIO never equates to 2X the speed unless you heavily modify the IO setting in vsphere, and even then it's problematic on the synos. Perhaps someone else has had better mileage, I didn't.
 
You can set the Synology to use two subnets different than your home LAN but then you would have to use your Hyper-V hosts as jump boxes to manage the Synology unless you created a route and interface to get to the Synology through your router.

Don't use teaming with iSCSI ever. MPIO.
 
NIC Teaming with MPIO just seems like an absurd combination.
 
shade91 said:
NIC Teaming with MPIO just seems like an absurd combination.
Click to expand...

So what do you do if you only have 2 NICs? Or even 3 NICs on a Hyper-V Server using iSCSI? You can make an argument for 1 NIC each if it's 10Gbps, a non redundant argument, but not 1Gbps...
 
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