10gigE iSCSI excellence! Surprisingly impressive.
The Microsoft Partner Solution Center is all about working with our partners and the exceptionally rapid deployment of complex data center solutions with our customers. Executing on these deployments with a surprisingly minimal operations staffing while adopting emerging architectures.
With this in mind, during the first week of November we deployed to our core production network a unified data center fabric of 10 gigabit Ethernet. Migrating well over 600 Hyper-v based virtual machine from a fiber channel fabric to hosts using the Microsoft iSCSI iniatior, Intel dual port 10gigE NICs and multi-session/target based iSCSI connections.
I viewed 10 gigabit ethernet from a different perspective than just performance and service delivery of multiple data center services. 10gigE has the potential of providing a unified data center fabric which in turn provides our small and agile operations staff with the ability to manage a more intuitive infrastructure. To build unified and reusable sets of automation tools that can easily span across multiple services such as data center storage (SAN) and provisioning of networks (802.1q trunks to Hyper-V virtualization hosts).
However, I was very pleasantly surprised when we discovered the performance improvement and ability to fully utilize our investment in our new gear. There were concerns that iSCSI wouldn't perform, couldn't achieve over 60-70% line rates or rumors that it was still just for small or mid-sized networks. But these concerns were quickly dispelled - we are able to fully tax our links to our iSCSI targets with surprisingly minimal impact on the host and target CPU and memory (task manager perfmon attached showing over 90% utilization via one server and port).
