iSCSI and LACP

[Credo]

I've read through the forums and have come across some postings about having multiple NIC's in the same subnet within FreeNAS as being considered "broken networking" I would definitely have to disagree. In the past this worked for me perfectly. I have 3 ESXi hosts running iSCSI storage as my shared storage. Each host has 4 Ethernet ports with iSCSI TOE. In the past, I used FreeNAS as my SP for iSCSI storage and everything worked perfectly, with great speed results.

Now that I'm unable to assign IP's to each interface, I've created an LACP connection with 4 ports on the FreeNAS unit. This just won't work - the speed just isn't there, latency is too high with the LACP configuration with one IP. Has anyone found a better solution? The only difference with my infrastructure, is upgrading to FreeNAS 9.2 from 8.1...

I'm thinking I should just downgrade if the old configuration worked so well...

Thanks in advance.

 

[Got2GoLV]

I've read through the forums and have come across some postings about having multiple NIC's in the same subnet within FreeNAS as being considered "broken networking" I would definitely have to disagree. In the past this worked for me perfectly. I have 3 ESXi hosts running iSCSI storage as my shared storage. Each host has 4 Ethernet ports with iSCSI TOE. In the past, I used FreeNAS as my SP for iSCSI storage and everything worked perfectly, with great speed results.

Now that I'm unable to assign IP's to each interface, I've created an LACP connection with 4 ports on the FreeNAS unit. This just won't work - the speed just isn't there, latency is too high with the LACP configuration with one IP. Has anyone found a better solution? The only difference with my infrastructure, is upgrading to FreeNAS 9.2 from 8.1...

I'm thinking I should just downgrade if the old configuration worked so well...

Thanks in advance.

1- Multiple interfaces on the same host, on the same subnet, is bad implementation. The fact that it worked for you does not mean its a good idea. It isn't...
Specially for iSCSI. And this is not unique to FreeNAS. It applies to all IP networks. Some OSs will have more issues with this than others in the way they route packets in/out of each interface. If you are using non-routable IP address space (which you should be for iSCSI) I see no reason to do this. Use IPs in different subnets. I see 0(zero, none) drawbacks to doing it correctly in separate subnets. It's as easy to do as having them all in the same subnet. Exactly the same steps.

2- How did you have this configured in the past ? (where you say it was working perfectly)

3- Re: "Now that I'm unable to assign IP's to each interface"

Can you expand on that ?
(because you have no keyboard ? because you ran out of usable IPs ? Because the GUI is broken ? Other ?

4- Re: LACP
I hope you are not trying to use LACP for iSCSI...that's another "broken networking" implementation.

5- Re: "Better solution"
Sure, configure it as intended.

iSCSI on separate subnets per interface + MPIO. Works great.
Gives you redundant paths + "aggregation"(not exactly) of bandwidth for multiple streams (busy servers where IO is randomized per connection between all available interfaces, creating something close to aggregated interfaces)