A suggestion from practice and experience.

Don’t waste money for NIC with TOE…

The Gbit NIC currently installed on good servers (Intel, Broadcom…) can do the job without TOE..with excellent performances not only for ESX IP-SAN envrionment but also for other os

Question: you wrote “TOE for NFS” ??? TOE (TCP Off Load Engine) do the incapsulation of SCSI in IP -> iSCSI. Only!

Da: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] Per conto di Page, Jeremy
Inviato: mercoledì 30 gennaio 2008 14.38
A: toasters@mathworks.com
Oggetto: ToE and NFS in VMware

On page 20 of  Network Appliance and VMware ESX Server 3.0 Storage Best Practices the authors say “With the release of VMware ESX 3.0.1 Support for TOE enabled NICs has been added”, can someone tell me where I can find a list of TOE enabled NICs for 3.5? Everything I have read says that TOE is only supported for iSCSI, not NFS.

I am getting ready to move a mid to large sized ESX environment from FC to NFS (probably with x3850’s) and I want to make certain I get the right NICs. If I can use TOE cards for NFS then that’s a no brainer, but I want to make certain there will be a benefit.

If not does anyone have any recommendations?  I want to make certain they support TSO and hopefully IOAT (at least I’d like to experiment with it), even if they are just regular NICs

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