ESX 3.5 Round Robin Load Balancing

Damin started an interesting discussion about ESX 3.5 Round Robin Load Balancing at the VMware Technology Network. He is experimenting with the Wasabi Systems iSCSI Target.

I just wanted to report back on my success using Round Robin Multipath Load Balancing for Vmware ESX 3.5. My production SAN is running on the Wasabi Systems iSCSI Target. I'm very happy w/ the results of the Wasabi Systems software. After about a month and a half of pretty intense work and testing w/ the Wasabi developers, I've got Multipath I/O w/ Round Robin Load balancing working at a production stable level. Along the way, I managed to identify a few issues w/ Wasabi that resulted in a few driver updates and some patches to their iSCSI target that solved some issues that I've had. I am currently running a specially compiled Beta (v4.0.2 **Pre-Release** BETA5-N2NET-4) that has some changes in the way that they handle SCSI reservation conflicts. With those changes, and the updated drivers I can get sustained reads and writes of 180 MB / second using two NICs.