Solaris iSCSI Multipathing

XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
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Going out on a limb here hoping somebody can tell me if I've either done something wrong or if my expectations are wrong (gea you here?). I got tired of my noisy, power hogging Cisco switches, so I tossed the fiber channel out and went back to iSCSI. Multipathing is setup on both sides. ESXi host side show traffic leaving is balanced across all 4 ports very evenly and consistent with in a couple of percent. On the Solaris side side (storage server) however, it bounces around between load balanced-ish (30%/30%/15%/15%) to basically not at all (3%/3%/90%/3%). Looking at r/w stats, it's not balancing writes at all, just reads.

ESXi 6.0 on host side, Solaris 11.3 on the storage side. Quad Port Intel 1GbE NIC's on both, running through a dedicated GbE switch. Jumbo Frames enabled on both sides.

Host:
20170204042152-cdedd9ce.png


Storage:
20170204042154-53916d74.png


Storage a few seconds later:
20170204042154-ab8f1931.png


This link would seem to indicate I'm not the only person to have seen this behavior: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1223905

However, I can't find any info stating this is normal behavior nor do I see any settings allowing you to set load balancing separately between reads and writes (which would seem silly anyways).