topic Re: windows 2003 disk utilization problem in Windows Server 2003

windows 2003 disk utilization problem

Yazan Yacoub — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:38:05 GMT

Hello,

I have windows server 2003 connected to EVA8K, users reported poor performance yesterday, I have checked system resources from OVPM, every thing look fine, in addition I have checked the HBA's throughput it was normal.
But only thing have seems to have problem is Disk utilization which reporting 100% all the time, even if the problem not present.
One disk presented from 8K EVA â Hâ 2 TB which including all user data.

I did more analysis from disk side and I came with following reports.
Attached

Please advice

Re: windows 2003 disk utilization problem

Gfuss — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:18:11 GMT

Yazan,
It appears the issue is in reading that data (high queue length) and not writing.

What type of vRAID is this and how many disks are in the disk group?

I'm not sure how easy is it to find for your drive, but I always format my NTFS partitions with 32K blocks after using diskpart to create the partition with a 64k alignment. This decreases the amount of 'spindles' that need accessing during the read/write commands.

-Gfuss

Re: windows 2003 disk utilization problem

Yazan Yacoub — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:18:34 GMT

Thanks,

I have checked the disk group it has 25% of free space, i dont think its disk group problem, since I have other Vdisks with no performance problem, in addition disk utilization is always 100% for this disk and I got user complain only once, I am wondering if this reading is true, what if windows perfmon calculation cant give real status of SAN disk ?

Please advice

Re: windows 2003 disk utilization problem

Gfuss — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:36:06 GMT

I'd give HP a call and work with an engineer to obtain the queue length on the HBA/Controller itself. I've not done this and am unsure if it can be done from Windows or needs to be viewed on the HBA and/or SAN controller.

-Gfuss