Very very slow file access iSCSI NSS on SLES11/XEN/OES11

Hi,

Like many Novell customers while carrying out a hardware refresh we are moving off traditional Netware 6.5 to OES11 and at the same time virtualising our environment.

We have new Dell Poweredge 620 serves attached by 10gig iSCSI to Equalogic SAN

Installed SLES will all patches and updates and XEN and then created OES11 SP2 virtual machines, these connect to NSS volume by iSCSI

Migrated files from traditional netware server to new hardware and stated testing and ran into very very slow files access times

A 3.5mb pdf file takes close to 10 minutes to open from local PC with Novell Client installed, same if no client and open via cifs. Opening same file off traditional NW6.5 server takes 3-4 seconds.

We have had a case open with Novell for almost 2 months but they are unable to resolve.

To test other options we installed VMWare ESXi on the internal usb flash drive and booted off that, created same OES11 VM and connected to NSS on SAN and same pdf open in seconds.

The current stack of SLES11/XEN/OES11 is not able to be put into production

Any ideas where the bottleneck might be? We think is in XEN.

Thanks