HP P6000 Installation Manual page 8

Enterprise virtual array
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Table 1 Minimum recommended switch capabilities for a P6300/P6500 EVA-based IP-SAN
(continued)
Switch capability
Flow control support
Individual port speed and
duplex setting
Link aggregation/trunking
support
VLAN support
Spanning tree/rapid
spanning tree
Jumbo frame support
8
Reviewing and confirming your plans
Description
IP storage networks are unique in the amount of sustained bandwidth that is required to
maintain adequate performance levels under heavy workloads. Gigabit Ethernet flow
control (802.3x) technology should be enabled on the switch to eliminate receive and/or
transmit buffer cache pressure.
NOTE:
Some switch manufacturers do not recommend configuring flow control when
using jumbo frames, or jumbo frames with flow control. Consult the switch manufacturer
documentation for guidance on this issue. HP recommends implementing flow control
over jumbo frames for optimal performance. Flow control is required when using the HP
DSM and MPIO.
All ports on the switch, servers, and storage nodes should be configured to auto-negotiate
duplex and speed settings. Although most switches and NICs will auto negotiate the
optimal performance setting, if a single port on the IP storage network negotiates a
sub-optimal (100 megabit or less and/or half-duplex) setting, the entire SAN performance
can be impacted negatively. Check each switch and NIC port to make sure the
auto-negotiation is resolved to be 1000 Mb/s or 10 Gb/s with full-duplex.
Link aggregation and/or trunking support is important to enable when building a high
performance fault-tolerant IP storage network. HP recommends implementing link
aggregation and/or trunking technology when doing switch-to-switch trunking, server
NIC load balancing, and server NIC link aggregation (802.3ad).
Implementing a separate subnet or VLAN for the IP storage network is a best IP-SAN
practice. If implementing VLAN technology within the switch infrastructure, you typically
need to enable VLAN tagging (802.1q) and/or VLAN trunking (802.1q or InterSwitch
Link [ISL] from Cisco). Consult your switch manufacturer configuration guidelines when
enabling VLAN support.
In order to build a fault-tolerant IP storage network, multiple switches are typically
connected into a single Layer 2 (OSI Model) broadcast domain using multiple
interconnects. In order to avoid Layer 2 loops, the Spanning Tree protocol (802.1D) or
Rapid Spanning Tree protocol (802.1w) must be implemented in the switch infrastructure.
Failing to do so can cause numerous issues on the IP storage networks, including
performance degradation or even traffic storms. HP recommends implementing rapid
spanning tree if the switch infrastructure supports it for faster spanning tree convergence.
If the switch is capable, consider disabling spanning tree on the server switch ports so
that they do not participate in the spanning tree convergence protocol timings.
NOTE:
FCoE should be configured with spanning-tree disabled at the first level server
edge switch.
Sequential read and write, or streaming workloads, can benefit from a larger maximum
frame size than 1514 bytes. The iSCSI and iSCSI/FCoE modules are capable of frame
sizes up to 9 Kbytes. Better performance is realized when the NICs and iSCSI initiators
are configured for 4 Kbyte (maximum frame size of 4088 bytes) jumbo frames. Jumbo
frames must be enabled on the switch, the iSCSI and iSCSI/FCoE modules, and all
servers connected to the IP-SAN. Typically, jumbo frames are enabled globally on the
switch or per VLAN and on a per port basis on the server.
NOTE:
Some switch manufacturers do not recommend configuring jumbo frames when
using flow control, or flow control with jumbo frames. Consult the switch manufacturer
documentation for guidance on this issue. HP recommends implementing flow control
over jumbo frames for optimal performance.

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