Windows File Share Cluster - Slow Performance?

[flyinghaggis]

We been finding that when accessing our SAN via a Windows 2008 SMB file cluster the performance is incredibly poor. So bad in fact that we've found even one user transferring files off a USB hard drive to the network causes a noticeable slow down for other users. Accessing the same disks on the SAN through a standard SMB share works file so it's definitely something to do with the cluster setup that's impacting it.

 

Has anyone else on here noticed a drop in performance when accessing a SAN over a file cluster or is there anything obvious we may have configured incorrectly when setting up the cluster?

[deano]

We been finding that when accessing our SAN via a Windows 2008 SMB file cluster the performance is incredibly poor. So bad in fact that we've found even one user transferring files off a USB hard drive to the network causes a noticeable slow down for other users. Accessing the same disks on the SAN through a standard SMB share works file so it's definitely something to do with the cluster setup that's impacting it.

 

Has anyone else on here noticed a drop in performance when accessing a SAN over a file cluster or is there anything obvious we may have configured incorrectly when setting up the cluster?

 

Are you using multiple NICs or just the one?

[cscott]

We're ran a 3 server Windows 2008 file server cluster connected to an iSCSI SAN for 3-4 years with no issues - average 800-1000 comcurrent users with peaks of 1,200-1,500 concurrent users - replaced this with a 4 node Windows 2008 R2 cluster, same SAN same load figures about 6 months ago, no issues so far.

 

Really need a bit more info to provide any help, i.e. is your SAN iSCSI, Fibre Channel, what sort of disks has it got, what's the RAID configuration etc... and as deano said number of network cards - we use 4 in each server, 2 setup as a team to service clients and 2 connected to the iSCSI SAN in a multi-path IO configration - during busy periods we often see 60-70% utlisation on the network cards