Hello all. We recently purchased HP Proliant DL380 G7 server and also a HP Lefthand P4500 G2 24TB iSCSI box.
The server itself has Quad Ethernet based on the BCM5709 Chipset from Broadcom (NetXtreme II).
My main question is about iSCSI offload mechanism, as iSCSI itself is pretty new to me but I have gotten a good hold on it tho.
I have managed to setup and configured our Lefthand box into our iSCSI Network. iSCSI network : 192.168.200.0/24
I have also managed to setup and configure a fully operational Software based iSCSI traffic from the server to the Target without problems. Everything just works fine. Until I thought about iSCSI offload functionality offered by the Network Adapter in the server.
As for the Software based iSCSI connection I have bonded(NIC Teamed) two NIC's on the server into a ALB(Adaptive Load Balancing) configuration.
Those are eth2,eth3 interfaces configured as bond1 with IP address of : 192.168.200.20 (iSCSI network).
My decision to team up eth2 and eth3 into ALB was clearly based on the HP Lefthand configuration guidelines. They state that the Lefthand box itself should be configured into ALB. So I configured the server also.
But, am I misunderstanding the iSCSI thing about offload and or network configurations ? If I'm going to use offload mechanisms do I need to get rid of the bonding setup ? I'm asking because the server offers 4 interfaces, and also 4 iscsi offload interfaces :S
These are the messages from dmesg :
bnx2: Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit Ethernet Driver bnx2 v2.1.12b (Oct 14, 2011) bnx2 0000:03:00.0: eth0: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (C0) PCI Express found at mem f4000000, IRQ 16, node addr e4:11:5b:b6:92:e0 bnx2 0000:03:00.1: eth1: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (C0) PCI Express found at mem f2000000, IRQ 17, node addr e4:11:5b:b6:92:e2 bnx2 0000:04:00.0: eth2: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (C0) PCI Express found at mem f8000000, IRQ 18, node addr e4:11:5b:b6:92:e4 bnx2 0000:04:00.1: eth3: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (C0) PCI Express found at mem f6000000, IRQ 19, node addr e4:11:5b:b6:92:e6
After I launch up iscsi, and iscsid these messages appear :
iscsi: registered transport (tcp) iscsi: registered transport (iser) Chelsio T3 iSCSI Driver cxgb3i v2.0.0 (Jun. 2010) iscsi: registered transport (cxgb3i) Chelsio T4 iSCSI Driver cxgb4i v0.9.1 (Aug. 2010) iscsi: registered transport (cxgb4i) cnic: Broadcom NetXtreme II CNIC Driver cnic v2.5.7g (September 23, 2011) bnx2 0000:03:00.0: eth0: Added CNIC device bnx2 0000:03:00.1: eth1: Added CNIC device bnx2 0000:04:00.0: eth2: Added CNIC device bnx2 0000:04:00.1: eth3: Added CNIC device Broadcom NetXtreme II iSCSI Driver bnx2i v2.7.0.4i (Nov 01, 2011) iscsi: registered transport (bnx2i) scsi123 : Broadcom Offload iSCSI Initiator bnx2i [04:00.01]: ISCSI_INIT passed scsi124 : Broadcom Offload iSCSI Initiator bnx2i [04:00.00]: ISCSI_INIT passed scsi125 : Broadcom Offload iSCSI Initiator scsi126 : Broadcom Offload iSCSI Initiator bnx2i [03:00.00]: ISCSI_INIT passed
iscsiadm -m iface -P1 shows me these interfaces
Iface: default Iface: iser Iface: bnx2i.00:00:00:00:00:00 Iface: bnx2i.e4:11:5b:b6:92:e1 Iface: bnx2i.e4:11:5b:b6:92:e5 Iface: bnx2i.e4:11:5b:b6:92:e7
Am I correct that you can't bind more then one interface to a iscsi target ? As the physical interfaces (eth2, eth3) are bonded together how would I use those virtual bnx2i (offload) interfaces as bond ?
Is that what they call multipath ? Do I need multipath in this setup? One server, one switch, one iSCSI target box.
Any help, information and guidelines would be much appreciated about this scenario. I'm really lost about this one, and would clearly like my server to operate at the top... :)
The server is running up_to_date Centos 6.2 x_64 and with the newest Broadcom drivers.
Best regards,
Svavar O Reykjavik - Iceland