10 Gigabit Network Configurations on VMware vSphere

By default, the SoftNAS® VM (on VMware vSphere) ships with the default E1000 virtual NIC adapter and VMware defaults to MTU 1500.

For best performance results above 1

Gigabit, follow the steps outlined below:

•  Replace the E1000 virtual NIC adapter with a vmxnet3 on the SoftNAS® VM.
  
  
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  Use MTU 9000 instead of MTU 1500 for vSwitch, vmKernel and physical switch configurations. Be sure to configure the network interface in SoftNAS for MTU 9000 also.

• Info
  For more information on MTU 9000, click here.

  
  

iSCSI Multi-pathing

To increase performance throughput and resiliency, use of iSCSI multipathing is recommended by VMware and other vendors.

Since SoftNAS operates in a hypervisor environment, it is possible to configure multi-path operation as follows:

1. On the VMware host where the SoftNAS® VM runs, install and use multiple physical NIC adapters.
    
2. Assign a dedicated vSwitch for each incoming iSCSI target path (one per physical NIC).
    
3. Assign the SoftNAS® VM a dedicated virtual NIC adapter for each incoming iSCSI target path (per vSwitch physical NIC).
    
4. Assign a unique IP address to each corresponding Linux network interface (for each virtual NIC attached to the SoftNAS® VM).
    
5. Restart the SoftNAS iSCSI service and verify connectivity from the iSCSI initiator client(s) to each iSCSI target path.