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:

1. Replace the E1000 virtual NIC adapter with a vmxnet3 on the SoftNAS® VM.
    
2. 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.
    
3. Refer to the MTU 9000 section for more information. 

A dedicated VLAN for storage traffic is recommended. For VMware, refer to the Performance Tuning for VMware vSphere section for details.

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.

A dedicated VLAN for storage traffic is recommended.