Xenserver 5.5 connected to iscsi SAN

Citrix xenserver has the bond feature built in.  I just have been ahvinb performance issues.  I have no reason to belive its the SAN besides that I  dont know waht else to look at.

I though maybe because i created the bond on xenserver, but the hp procurve switch does not know its a trunk (what procurve calls bounded ports)
I never done a trunk on a procurve, i just read about it in the past.

Dell does not make a hitkit for xenserver version of linux. Its an equalogic san. So wo a hitkit no matter what I do I'm only sharing a single gig port across all vm's :(

Wish I went with vmware or hyper-v

One gig does not seem that much if your have 10+ VM's on it.
Although it never seems maxed out. We are getting high pagging levels.
So i was thinking maybe it was the pipe to the SAN slowing down paging.

 

We are working on performance issues as well.  We are running 10Gb Equallogic with Xenserver 5.6.  We thought we'd get smoking performance out of 10Gb, but Dell is saying that only the largest workloads tax even the 1Gb stuff.  Really??

heh.
what is your performance issue?
did you isolate it  at all?

LOL same.
im going to try hyper-v as im told the hitkit is easy to get working.

I even have the recommended force10 iscsi switches.  it should be rocking.

Interesting.  We bought Cisco switches and then with the issues we have been having, Dell recommended the Force10.  They offered a demo, but we are getting things ironed out with the Cisco, so we declined.

I can tell you that all of the Equallogic engineers have nothing good to say about Hyper-V.  That was at the Equallogic conference a year ago in San Diego, though.  Someone else said that Hyper-V has gotten much better.

hmm.  I was kind of against it.  But our exchange consultants recommended it. at the same time i realized a hitkit does not exist for xenserver.

Here are some of my SAN HQ graphs for some of the days we had performance issues.  seems ok i think...

We are seeing high retransmits to the XenServer hosts.  You can see the retransmits in the GUI, but you can't tell much more.  We have an open case with Dell and they just informed me this AM that it's between the SAN and the hosts!  We thought it was due to replication over a slow(er) link.

Have you checked that?

Where do you see that?

Click on "Network" in SANHQ.

Sorry i thought you meant you found something through the xencenter gui.

 

Retransmits looks great...

I cant imagine that percent is significant.    i would guess its less than 1%

Dell wants to see it under 1%.

so back to the original question.  AM i stuck to 1Gb/s for an entire xenserver host?
seems like bonding just adds redundency
and xenserver does not have a "hitkit" for MPIO

semi-unrelated, i created a new ticket specifically trying to figure out why my citrix VMS are slow.

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/27418555/performance-issues-on-citrix-xenapp-4-5-running-on-xenserver-vm's.html

I am tempted to build a new physical machine and scrap virtualizing my terminal servers.
Of coarse i have no idea thats the issue.

I don't know what a "hitkit" is, but MPIO on Xenserver is certainly possible, granted this is quite old but... http://cns-service.blogspot.com/2008/02/xenserver-mpio.html

Your other option of course is to just have boot volumes go through the host and have data volumes in the guests connect directly to your iSCSI SAN for other volumes, this would enable you to allocate multiple NICs for iSCSI operations.

you shouldn;t be seeing _any_ restransmits, unless you've got a bottleneck, how many spindles in your SAN ?

depending on the workloads in your hosts, I'd be tempted to use most of your NICs for iSCSI rather than server - client connectivity, unless you've got people opening _huge_ files in the TS environment, storage bandwidth to the SAN (and IOPS on the SAN) is going to be much more important.

All the counters on the SAN are "ideal" according to my dell engineer.  At least the Iops/latency and Que length.

Its something deeper Im guessing .. something in connectivity to the SAN , a configuration thing, possibly with the VM's. or maybe even the guest os.

i just wish there was a simple performance monitor that would tell me whats the bottleneck.  im losing my mind.  

as far as that article, im real scared to do that as im not a linux guy.  IF that is a few versions of xenserver old, who knows what I might break.

Maybe ill call Dell and see wht they got for me.  From my expeirence nobody knows anything about xenserver.  The dell xenserver support staff always say "sorry i am a VMware guy"

That's the first article I've seen talking about MPIO and Xenserver.  Even Citrix will tell you it's not supported.  So possible: yes.  Supported: No.  I wouldn't stake productions VMs on that.

The hitkit being referenced is the Dell Equallogic Host Integration Toolkit.

The one thing that we haven't talked about is your user environment.  What will you be virtualizing and for whom?

Mainly we are virtualizing our xenapp farm. I'd like to consider exchange someday and some light load sql servers. Ill keep my sql server on a standalone

We've got everything virtualized.  XenApp, SQL, Exchange, etc.  We are working through the performance issues, and I think it's going to get better.  There is anecdotal information out in our group that we are seeing better performance in XenApp than we did with VMware.  But, that was a long time ago.

I am preparing to move a VM SQL box back to physical and store the data on the SAN.  Microsoft's licensing is too crazy not to do that.

there is certainly a citrix document that talks about multipathing iSCSI on XENserver

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX129309

hmm thats for 5.6  5.6 no longer supports embeded xenserver. i would need to change to citrix licensing and install hard drives for the host. so for the near future ill be staying on 5.5 unfortunatly.
Ill see if i can find the same doc for 5.5

You can't multipath to Equallogic SANs.

ever? or you mean specifically in xenerver 5.5?

because my engineer told me for sure i can with hyper-v

oh so you just cant multipath to a equalogic san?

thought you had equalogic  also.

You can't natively in XenServer.  I think you can in Vmware.  Not sure about HyperV.

To this point, we have bonded 2 10GB nics and have used that for storage traffic.  I'm going to try breaking the bond, passing the two nics through to the guest, and then use the HIT kit to multipath.  See what that does for us....

We are an equallogic shop, btw.

Oh, i think you confsued me when you said:

ddotson:
You can't multipath to Equallogic SANs.

I thought about going that route, but it adds alot of steps. plus the native boot volume is still using the bound way (which is also how im setup)

Yeah - seems kludgy.  I've got to try it to see if the performance is better, though.  :)

waiting to see ddotson's results.  DO not close.

.

Holy cow...

So we got VMware setup and ran the same IOmeter tests that we have run in every conceivable combination on XenServer.

We are seeing 8-9 times better performance in Vmare than we are in Xenserver.  In fact, the CIO said that we will be moving back to Vmware.

hmm.  interesting.  My dell rep said they had some large scale implementations moving from vmware to xen for performance reasons.

I wish i went vmware.  im too deep to change now. i dont have the manpower.
:(
thanks for the info

Dell said that?  In all of my conversations, Xen is hardly a whisper on Dell's lips.  All of the Equallogic engineers at the Equallogic conference gave us blank stares when we told them we were using Xen.  :)

VMware is infinitely more complicated.  We were using 3.x I think before we switched over.  It didn't handle the storage as nicely as Xen.  I'm not looking forward to moving back.

Interesting. I only used the free version of it.  So i don't know how complicated it is i guess.

They said a few big customers did because they tuned xen for significantly improved performance.  i don't remember who.  But they were huge companies. Maybe its application specific.   I think they were trying to comfort me because i said I wish I went with vmware.
And it worked, knowing im not the only one using XEN.

When i decided an article mentioned citrix was heavily devoted, they would be the first to have supported SQL and Exchange support from Microsoft for Virtualizaiton.  Blah blah

I don't know if that every came true as im not putting my servers in a VM because i don't have the confidence yet.

The article also mentioned xenserver is 10-20% more efficant with xen app which is the core of our infrastructure.

Our guys saw a performance increase in XenApp.

I'm not down on XenServer - they do a lot of things I wish VMware did.  Storage is easier, VM management is easier, etc.  But passing all network traffic through Dom0 seems to be a problem for ISCSI traffic.

Dom0?

That's the XenServer OS...

lol. i never heard that before.
I heard xenserver and knew it was linux.  to funny.
your talking about citrix xenserver right? not the open source version?

Correct.

Vmware is a linux variant too.  

Thanks for including me on the solution.   My first time!

Enjoyed talking with you.

Yea i dont know i had a clearn "answer:" but all the info was helpful. Its nice when someone is willing to discuss issues vs quick links to other sites just trying to get the points.