This section contains Dell Technologies’ overall best-practices recommendations for SmartConnect on a PowerScale storage cluster.
- Overall network performance on a PowerScale storage cluster is at its highest when the network connection is to the same group of nodes hosting the underlying storage data. In other words, if home directories are stored on an H-node disk pool, then mounting end users to their home directories on the cluster via the H nodes’ network interfaces will yield the best performance.
- Idle end-user connections, as described in home-directory usage profiles above, have a negligible effect overall on cluster resources. When determining how best to configure a PowerScale storage cluster’s SmartConnect pools for home-directory load balancing, the determining factor should be the number of active user connections, rather than the number of total connections.
- For a PowerScale storage cluster that hosts multiple workloads, Dell recommends a connection-balancing policy based on active connections or CPU utilization levels, rather than the default round-robin policy, which does not factor in a given node’s existing workloads assigning new connections to the node.