topic Re: DL360 G9 Centos 7 in Operating System - Linux

DL360 G9 Centos 7

giversen — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 10:51:44 GMT

Hi,

I am a newbee with HPE and I apologize if I have some strange questions.

I got a refurbished DL360 G9 that I am setting up with Centos 7.5. Currently it is running, but I am a bit disapointed when it comes to disk IO performance.

The server consist of the following components

2 x E5-2640 v4
64GB HPE Ram
Dynamic Smart Array B140i Controller
3 x Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSDs

The SSDs are currently in RAID0 and I get the folowing speeds with

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.img bs=1G count=1 conv=fdatasync

1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB) copied, 3,38732 s, 317 MB/s

How can I improve disk IO performace. Would a P440ar improve the performance? Should I bypass the controller and let the OS take care of the disks? Any sugestions?

/Giversen

Re: DL360 G9 Centos 7

Jimmy Vance — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 15:18:11 GMT

@giversen wrote:
Hi,
I am a newbee with HPE and I apologize if I have some strange questions.
I got a refurbished DL360 G9 that I am setting up with Centos 7.5. Currently it is running, but I am a bit disapointed when it comes to disk IO performance.
The server consist of the following components
2 x E5-2640 v4
64GB HPE Ram
Dynamic Smart Array B140i Controller
3 x Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSDs
The SSDs are currently in RAID0 and I get the folowing speeds with
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.img bs=1G count=1 conv=fdatasync
1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB) copied, 3,38732 s, 317 MB/s
How can I improve disk IO performace. Would a P440ar improve the performance? Should I bypass the controller and let the OS take care of the disks? Any sugestions?
/Giversen

The B140i is just an embedded chipset SATA controller. The RAID functionality is in the 'hpdsa' driver. The P440ar is a hardware RAID controller with a cache module.

Re: DL360 G9 Centos 7

giversen — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 16:55:56 GMT

Ok understood, thank you. I have ordered a P440ar.

I plan to drop the RAID0 config and deply a RAID5 config instead. Is the OS install for the P440ar the same as for the B140i, meaning that I have to interrupt the install process with "e" and write "modprobe.blacklist=ahci inst.dd" etc. or is there anything else to be aware of in the OS install process.

/Giversen

Re: DL360 G9 Centos 7

Jimmy Vance — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 17:19:45 GMT

@giversen wrote:
Ok understood, thank you. I have ordered a P440ar.
I plan to drop the RAID0 config and deply a RAID5 config instead. Is the OS install for the P440ar the same as for the B140i, meaning that I have to interrupt the install process with "e" and write "modprobe.blacklist=ahci inst.dd" etc. or is there anything else to be aware of in the OS install process.
/Giversen

No, you will not need to blacklist any modules. The 'hpsa' driver for the 'P" series Smart Array is an open source driver that is in the kernel tree.

Re: DL360 G9 Centos 7

giversen — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 17:24:04 GMT

Great thanks for the info.

/Giversen