Storage system performance is one of the major factors contributing to the performance of the entire iSCSI environment.
If issues occur with storage system performance, consult your storage system vendor’s documentation for any relevant information.
When you assign LUNs, remember that you can access each shared LUN through a number of hosts, and that a number of virtual machines can run on each host. One LUN used by the ESXi host can service I/O from many different applications running on different operating systems. Because of this diverse workload, the RAID group that contains the ESXi LUNs should not include LUNs that other hosts use that are not running ESXi for I/O intensive applications.
Enable read caching and write caching.
Load balancing is the process of spreading server I/O requests across all available SPs and their associated host server paths. The goal is to optimize performance in terms of throughput (I/O per second, megabytes per second, or response times).
SAN storage systems require continual redesign and tuning to ensure that I/O is load balanced across all storage system paths. To meet this requirement, distribute the paths to the LUNs among all the SPs to provide optimal load balancing. Close monitoring indicates when it is necessary to manually rebalance the LUN distribution.
Tuning statically balanced storage systems is a matter of monitoring the specific performance statistics (such as I/O operations per second, blocks per second, and response time) and distributing the LUN workload to spread the workload across all the SPs.
