QLogic QLE4062C now working with Jumbo frames on Update 2 ?

[George_B]

I am using QLogic QLE4062C HBAs and previously with 3.5 Update 1 if you enabled Jumbo frames the box would hang for ~10minutes on boot and then refuse to load the driver. A number of firmware releases from QLogic were meant to fix the problem but I am on the latest release and it was still no go. Now having not seen anything in the release notes about any bug fixes on this I thought I would give it a go anyway on Update 2.

To my surprise enabling Jumbo frames has not killed the box and it booted fine. I am just benchmarking it and checking its stability at the moment but it is looking good. Any one else in a similar situation and tried enabling Jumbo frames on Update 2?

[depping]

No, but I'm really curious if you see a substantial improvement. So let us know what the results are!

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[George_B]

So a bit of info, I am using the 3.0.1.45 Firmware with a Nortel ERS 5510 switch and a Equallogic PS100E. The HBA is connected with both ports and experimental load balancing is enabled. The SAN has about 70 demonstration very light load VMs on it and the SAN is split into 200GB LUNs with 10 VMs per LUN with 15GB per disk.

I am not using the HBA tweaks recommended by QLogic or Equallogic at the moment.

I ran IOmeter inside a windows XP VM who’s disk was on a lightly used LUN. I used the IOmeter test file use in the VMTN SAN benchmarking thread. On average I saw a 25% performance degradation with Jumbo frames enabled across all numbers, but at least I could enable it. I think I will need to look into the HBA configuration further to see if this can be improved.

[joergriether]

The latest firmware does the trick, check out

http://driverdownloads.qlogic.com/QLogicDriverDownloads_UI/SearchByProduct.aspx?ProductCategory=82&P...

I highly suggest to configure the tweaks, they are VERY important, especially when it comes to timeouts!!!

Check out:

http://www.riether.com/2008/06/qlogic-and-esx-all-stuff-you-should.html

best regards

Joerg

[George_B]

Just tried with .49 and the tweaks and it still decreases perfomance on average by 25% with jumbo frames enabled. Will upload the results when I get into the office on Monday.

[doubleH]

I've had this performance degridation when enabling jumbo's since 3.0.1 and I'm using HP Procurve switches (5406). I also don't believe Jumbo's are supported with HBA's yet....only supported when using the iSCSI initiator within a VM.

If you found this or any other post helpful please consider the use of the Helpfull/Correct buttons to award points

[George_B]

Attached is the I/O Meter output running the latest Firmware with the HBA setting tweaks and Jumbo frames enabled.

[George_B]

And a comparison with no Jumbo frames, tweaks but .34 Firmware