Handling Windows Network Shares

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m1abram

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So I am playing around with an All-in-One esxi box using Openindiania+Napp-it for my file storage. With testing I found that I can easily saturate my 1Gbps network reading and writing files to/from my windows desktop and the SMB share on the Openindiania VM. Even tested it with 2 desktop clients and can still saturate 1Gbps (Note the Esxi box has 4 1Gbps network adapters in LAG with my Switch).

So after seeing this great performance and noticing that my single spindle drive can only push 40-50MB/s. I had the idea of getting rid of my spindle drives in the desktops (note my desktops use an SSD for OS/Programs and a spindle for the Users directory).

Well playing around with Server 2012 and group policies I can set it up so the users profile directory is redirected to a network share. Great, however one issue I found. SMB does not support Windows Search Protocol so you do not get those Library features :(. Actually that is not that big a deal but I wanted to find a fix anyhow.

So instead of using the Openindiania box for the SMB share I decided to create an iSCSI target and have Server 2012 mount the iSCSI then share out the Users folder, since Server 2012 has the ability to index you get the full Library support. I expected a bit of a performance hit adding this extra layer, but not as much as I am seeing. So data writes have dropped to 20-30MB/s from the previous rate of 100-110MB/s.

I tested the iSCSI on the Server 2012 and get writes in the 240-300MB/s range so I am not sure why when I loose so much speed with the SMB share on Server 2012. Right now my ESXi box just has a single vSwitch with 4 physical networks attached to it. I am wonder if I should create a second vSwitch for just the iSCSI connections between the 2012 VM and Openindiania and have no nic attached to it since no outside machine needs it. Is the traffic on the single vSwitch a possible issue?

Again this is for play and learning, so while it may seem overly complex it is :). Just for fun.
 
What are the specs on your ESXi host and how much ram and vCPU's are you giving the OpenIndiana and Server 2012 VM's?
 
artbird309 said:
What are the specs on your ESXi host and how much ram and vCPU's are you giving the OpenIndiana and Server 2012 VM's?
Click to expand...

Esxi 5.1 Host:
MB: MBD-X9DR7-LN4F-O
CPU: 2x Xeon E5-2640
Memory: 32GB ECC RDMIMM
HBA: 1x onboard LSI 2308 crossflashed for IT, 1x LSI 9207-8i both passed thru to OI VM

OI VM:
4 vCPUs
12G memory

Server 2012:
4 vCPUs
4G memory

I tested OI using 2 vCPUs, 4 vCPUs, and 8 vCPUs against Bonnie.
Both read/write speeds jumped a good deal going from 2-4 vCPUs but did not change at all going from 4-8vCPUs
 
I ran some crystalmark tests yesterday. Sorry no screen shots.

Running the benchmark on the 2012 machine against the iscsi drive I originally was getting:
Seq Read of ~320MB/s and Write ~10MB/s

Obviously the writes were an issue so on the OI box I turned on WriteBack cache for the iSCSI target and got this:

Seq Read: ~320MB/s Write ~320MB/s

Course with WriteBack cache turned on I do risk data loss on power failure, however I have UPS and have ESXi setup to gracefully shutdown if a power failure so that risk should be small.

Now those speeds really do not change much from test to test so I think I am bumping up against a speed cap for VMwares Net driver. I am also very happy with those speeds.

So the issue appears to be with SMB.
On a Win7 Guest machine (4 vCPUs, 4GB Memory) using the vmxnet3 driver on the same host I ran benchmarks against mapped drives.

Server 2012 mapped drive from the iSCSI drive in test above.
Seq. Read: ~50-60MB/s Write ~60-70MB/s

OI smb mapped ZFS folder
Seq. Read: ~100MB/s Write ~100MB/s

Clearly I expected these number to be less than the iSCSI test, but did not expect that much of a fall off. It seems I need to tune SMB a bit, is there any suggestions on tuning it?

Thanks.
 
smb/cifs is inherently slow and poor performing. have you tried 2012s NFS capabilities?
 
4saken said:
smb/cifs is inherently slow and poor performing. have you tried 2012s NFS capabilities?
Click to expand...

No I have not, how well is NFS supportted by Win7 clients?

My end goal here is to have decent enough performance so that I can use folder redirection for my client machines user folders. Technically I have already exceeded the performance (slightly) of the mechanical harddrives I am using on the clients right now, just want to maximize it.
 
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