10G iSCSI or 4GB Fiber?

[kellino]

This may turn out to be an active thread

We are looking at a new infrastructure to support about 50 initial VMs (production environment), and now that 10Gig Ethernet is supported, I am wondering what the pros and cons are for 10G iSCSI versus 4GB Fiber.

I see this question was raised here in the past, but not since 10Gig support was added in ESX 3.5 Update 1.

Not being an expert, my initial thoughts are that 10G should be less expensive and may even offer better performance under high loads, but this is a bit "new" while fiber is the "safe" and traditional choice and I'm not sure what "gotchas" to be aware of.

I am curious to hear experiences from others and their thoughts about which network technology would be the better choice for new VI3 deployments, hosting production servers.

Thanks!

[mreferre]

As per Infiniband........ there is a difference between what's best and what's viable in everyday's life. Infiniband is still probably the best but the industry is moving towards 10Gbit Ethernet as it seems more viable.

Massimo.

[Ken_Cline]

To add to what Massimo said...Infiniband can be screaming fast - but in reality, most people don't need that much speed. In reality, most people are not over-driving their 1Gb storage solutions - much less their 4/8/10Gb solutions. Yes, there are cases out there where the PATH to storage is the bottleneck, but it's not the norm. Most of the time, the bottleneck lives within the storage frame, where there aren't enough spindles, there isn't enough cache, etc., etc.

It doesn't do you any good to have a firehose if all you've got is a standard garden spigot!

Ken Cline

Technical Director, Virtualization

Wells Landers

TVAR Solutions, A Wells Landers Group Company

VMware Communities User Moderator

[mreferre]

Correct.

In fact I usually referred to IB Vs 10Gbit Eth not so much for speed but for the capabilities to converge all cabling onto a single media (well 2x for redundancy reasons).

Most of the time the 10+ / 20+ ports (Eth+FC) coming out from an ESX server are meant to provide security&segmentation rather than "performance".

Massimo.

[TheHevy]

I would take a look at the best practices white paper that I wrote regarding 10G and VMware vSphere 4.

Simplifying Networking using 10G Ethernet

Brian Johnson

Intel Corp -- LAN Access Division

PME - 10G and Virtualization Technologies