SMB, iSCSI and NFS Performance

Samba shares can be set up easily by enabling the Microsoft Networking service. Under Access Rights Management, any of the folders in the NAS can be included in the 'Share Folders' section. Running the Intel NASPT benchmark and the robocopy tests gave us the following results:

Note that we have also run the benchmarks with the write cache enabled. This shows more than 35% improvement in the write intensive workloads, but the usual expected performance improvement is between 10 to 20% in general use. Unfortunately, it is recommended that the write cache be turned off for virtualized environments.

Moving on to iSCSI, it is again quite straightforward to enable the iSCSI service in the Disk Management's iSCSI subsection. The Target Management tab has a Quick Configuration Wizard to help create an iSCSI target and LUN.

In addition to the NASPT benchmarks for iSCSI, we also put the target through the HD Tune Pro benchmarks. The gallery below presents the various metrics of interest.

In order to test out NFS performance, we set up port trunking with 802.3ad for the ESA I340 in Ubuntu 11.04. rsync was used to replicate the robocopy command of transferring a 10.7 GB Blu-ray folder structure to the NAS and back from it.

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