Saturday, November 7, 2009

Enabling Jumbo Frames on bge interface V240/M4000 and Netapp Filer

I need to enable jumbo frames settings on the Sun server which is connected to the Netapp 3020 through iSCSI Lun's. These lun's  are used for Oracle database.  Initially the storage utilization was very high. Once the jumbo frames enabled, its reduced considerably. mtusize 9000 bytes seems to be the generally accepted size for jumbo frames.

To enable jumbo frames on this setup, the configuration on each point in the network must be configured to support jumbo frames.That means I need to enable jumbo frames on the  host interface(s) and the Filer interface and on the switch if its connected through the switch else the network connection will not have jumbo frames enabled and may not succeed.


Here is how I enabled for the Sun Server bge interface:

1.  Enabled jumbo frames on the server by editing the /etc/system file

             set bge:bge_jumbo_enable = 1

2. Edit the file “/platform/sun4u/kernel/drv/bge.conf ”for Jumbo frame settings. Each line ends with a semi-column(;)

   default_mtu             = 9000;  
    name="bge" parent="/pci@0,600000" unitaddress="2" default_mtu=9000;

bash-3.00# ifconfig -a

bge1: flags=201000843 mtu 9000 index 3
        inet 172.168.0.20 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 172.168.255.255
        ether 0:xx:xx:xx:xx:f1

Enabling Jumbo Frames on the Netapp FAS3020

filerA>ifconfig e0b  mtusize 9000 mediatype 1000fx flowcontrol full
filerA> ifconfig e0b up
filerA> ifconfig -a

e0b: flags=948043 mtu 9000
        inet 172.168.0.10 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 172.168.0.255
        ether 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:87 (auto-1000t-fd-up) flowcontrol full