Best performance for storage EVA4400.

[Augusto José Descrovi]

Hi!
I need to present 1TB from storage (EVA4400) for my Windows 2008 Server.
Whats is the best for performance: create one disk with 1TB or create 10 disks with 100GB for example?
Thanks,
Augusto

[Amar_Joshi]

Better configuration is to use multiple VDisks and use the load-balancing on the host using MPIO-DSM for EVA. This way you will be able to use both HSV controllers and multiple HBAs for IO load balancing.

Install the MPIO DSM Manager and recommended setting for EVA LUN is to use SQST (Shortest Queue Service Time) and also and set ALB to Y (yes) for all the EVA LUNs.

EVA doesnt give any performance benefits in terms of 1 LUN or 10 LUNs but it's the host configuration which matters. In your case 10 is the very high number which can be a headache to manage within OS but you are good with any number larger than 1 e.g. 4 x 250GB.

Last question to ask yourself is how good are you at Windows volume management? because managing volume group in Windows can be a pain compare to what UNIX systems volume manager does.

Hope that helps.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hello Augusto.

For you I think this would depend on how many iops or MB/s that the physical disks in your EVA can push out.

If you don't have that many disks and the load will not be more than one controller can handle, I don't see why you should split the disk in separate vdisks, for performance benefits.
If you do have quite a lot of load on that disk, you could split it in 2x500GB and then split ownership between the controllers.

Just thought about this (no idea if it would work), but on the EVA the max LUN/vdisk size that you can resize is 2TB. For now you have no problem, but if you in the future need to increase the size for this storage, maybe it would be better to have several underlying luns/vdisks that you can increase the size of?

As amardeep mentioned, it may be quite tricky though to accomplish these kind of things on the OS side.