Background. I've tried the Synology forums and have not received much response from their iSCSI message board. I am trying to find a solution to iSCSI MCS traffic issue. I am also looking for recommendations on using VLANs in a HTPC environment.
Problem. The HTPC has one NIC and the NAS has four with two connected. All are on the same subnet. The Initiator is configured to use MCS with Round Robin policy. However, the traffic to the NAS is not split / balanced between the two NICs. The reason for the balance is to have high reliability and peformance since its a recording drive. The NAS can get traffic from several different clients in addition to the HTPC. iSCSI, SMB and AFP services always use LAN1. I even tried configuring the NAS firewall to force the services to specific ports, but that caused responsiveness issues.
Seeking Advice. The routers and switches are VLAN capable. Should I setup VLANs to direct the traffic? For instance only three ports need to have tuner traffic (HTPC, VM and Tuner). Also, the Extenders could be placed on a separate VLAN as well.
Hardware.
HTPC
Intel NUC DC53427HYE i5 Dual-Core
Intel 525 Lincoln Crest SSD 240GB
Mushkin Blackline 1600MHz CL9 16GB
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
NAS
Synology DS1813+
8 x 1TB HGST 0S03563 32MB Cache 7200RPM 2.5"
(7 Disk RAID 5 Volume & 1 Disk Block Level iSCSI)
4GB RAM
WMC Components
2 x Ceton Echo Media Center Extenders
1 x Ceton InfiniTV6 ETH OCCUR Tuner
Network Equipment
Ubiquiti EdgeMax EdgeRouter Lite
Ubiquiti UAP-AC Access Point
2 x Ubiquiti ToughSwitch
Configuration. The OS is installed on the SSD. The recording drive is configured to use the iSCSI Target on the Synology DS1813+ connected with two of four LAN ports. The Microsoft iSCSI Initiator is configured with as single iSCSI Target Portal and one Favorite. One additional connection was added to the session for MCS and policy set to Round Robin. There is a single subnet 10.0.1.0/24. The EdgeRouter Ethernet port 0 is WAN, Ethernet port 1 is WLAN, and Ethernet port 2 is LAN. There is a bridge configured between port 1 and port 2 using the same NAT / Firewall Policy and DHCP server. IP addresses are managed using static mappings. iSCSI throughput is measured at 110MB/s copying HD recordings to and from the SSD. WiFi throughput is measured at 18MB/s.