Wired Intelligent Edge

I'm looking to get feedback if anyone has used the 3810M-16 SFP+ switch for iSCSI and what your thoughts are? Do you have the pair stacked or independent?

We are considering two of these for iSCSI traffic between storage and hyper-v cluster. 

Our existing switch network (pro-sumer) can't seem to handle traffic (STP and buffer issues). Hoping jumping up from 2MB to 16MB and possibly stacking these would help. 

2 storage nodes, 4 compute nodes, 90+ VMs. 10G storage network interfaces.

2MB buffer is not a lot, 3810 would work in a medium sized enviroment

The nature of iSCSI and TCP means that the network switches in an iSCSI SAN receives
bursts of packets. Network switches should support adequate buffers that are able to
store the bursts or traffic while flow control has paused transmissions.For optimal switch performance, Hewlett Packard Enterprise recommends that the switch have at least 512KB of buffer cache per port. Consult switch specifications for the total buffer cache. If the switch aggregates cache among a group of ports (that is 1MB of cache per 8 ports) space your utilized ports appropriately to avoid cache oversubscription.

Saying you connect 2 storage nodes and 4 servers, you need 6 interfaces per switch. 6x512KB = requires a minumum of 3MB of buffer size, an 3810 has 13.5 MB buffer size fare as i known, so yes its possible but not on a very large scale as Fabian mentioned to.

Some other recommendation:

- Keep iscsi switches dedicated to iscsi functionality

- Always turn on flowcontrol

- Default keep jumbo frames disabled, until you know what you doing ;) for some optimalization.

I use 2 of them stacked to support an 8 node Nutanix cluster (no iSCSI). The work great. I got them HP Renew so it was a really good deal. Not more than 20K for both with Stacking modules, 40 GB Modules and extra power supplies.