Best practices - 4 NIC on the Starwind server. LACP or MPIO?

[smunzani]

Hi,

I am trying to get better throughput. On two ESXi 5 servers I am doing MPIO with route-robin policy for 2 NIC. I have 4 physical NICs in the starwind server now. What's best practice for the starwind server connections? The goal is to get maximum throughput.

I found many posts here but no clear recommendations. I searched and read many papers on starwind site and google but haven't found a single good document that explains NIC setup on the Starwind server side. Everybody talks about the iSCSI initiator side but none about the server setup.

1. Do I setup 2 individual NIC with 2 different IPs?
2. Do I setup microsoft MPIO at all?
3. If I setup 2 nic with 2 different IP, do I put both of these IPs in my iSCSI discovery on the ESX side?

Too many confusions. Can someone point me to best practices for the high performance?

Thanks,
Sam

[@ziz (staff)]

In the StarWind server side there is nothing to do, no MPIO nor LACP. You have 4 NICs on this server and 2 NICs on each of your 2 ESXi, the best configuration is to point from each ESXi to two NICs on the StarWind server, this should provide best performance, and MPIO on the ESXi will do the rest. This is the simplest way.

[smunzani]

Got it. So each of the 4 NIC will have its own IP address in same subnet.
e.g.
NIC1: 10.10.10.1
NIC2: 10.10.10.2
NIC3: 10.10.10.3
NIC4: 10.10.10.4

On ESX1 when I point it to iSCSI discovery: Add two entries:
10.10.10.1 and 10.10.10.2

On ESX2 when I point it to iSCSI discovery: Add two entries:
10.10.10.3 and 10.10.10.4

Which option from the two diagrams below?
Option # 1:

Option # 1.png (36.73 KiB) Viewed 4291 times

Option # 2:

Option # 2.png (48.89 KiB) Viewed 4284 times

[@ziz (staff)]

Option 2 will be better.