Poor Performance Sharing iSCSI Attached Drive

[Guest SteveR]

I have an Equallogic iSCSI SAN attached to a HP DL360 G5 Server via MS iSCSI

initiator 2.06 and a Foundry FLS624 switch dedicated to the iSCSI traffic.

When I copy data to/from the iSCSI attached SAN to the local C:\ drive on the

server it performs very well.

 

When I share the iSCSI attached SAN then do the same read/write test from a

XP workstation on a GB network, I get great performance when writing to the

share however when reading from the server is really slow. Looking at the

network performance under task manager, I see 54% when writing and only 20%

when reading.

 

Test Server = HP DL360 G5

 

Test workstation is a Dell Precision 390 attached to the same Foundry FLS

624 switch.

 

Tested NIC Cards NC373i NC380t NC360T Intel server 1000pro pt quad port.

 

Tested Windows Server 2003 SP1 SP2 R2 and Server 2008

 

iSCSI Initiator 2.4 - 2.6

 

My test is a single 2gb file.

 

All windows Scalable Networking is disabled via the recently released

Windows Update as well as all of the related NIC settings.

 

Netsh int ip set chimney DISABLED

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

EnableRSS == 0

EnableTCPA == 0

Enabletcpchimney == 0

 

I have escalated this issue to engineering in HP support. They are able to

duplicate the problem easily however they are sure that the problem resides

in Windows Server 2003. When we install Server 2008 trial the problem goes

away which eliminates the hardware.

 

I’m hoping that since the problem is so easy to duplicate that others have

seen it and there is a fix out there somewhere.

 

Thanks

 

Steve