E200 with Linux

[PC Doc]

Question for Marco Stefanetti.

How exactly did you enable physical drive write caching. I have the SATA drives as supplied by HP for the hot swap bay. I had heard it was possible to turn the cache back on, but don't know how to do it.

I have 500 Gb drives installed and have run the dd if= of= test for 500M and 2000M files in raid 0, 0+1 and 5 modes on the E200, then removed the card and ran the same tests running mdadm raid 1. I got better results without the E200 installed.

At no stage have I been able to get above 50M/sec except with single non hardware or software raid. If I can get your speeds running with the E200 in raid 0+1 I will be ecstatic.

The unit is a HP ML150 with 8GB RAM running Ubuntu 8.04 64bit with windows 2003 Term server in VM for 20 users. When outlook 2007 is running for 3 clients, hardware interupts get up around 40%.

From my research, I feel it is because of the poor write speed to the Virtual drives causing the problem. I made the adjustments per http://blog.dhampir.no/content/performance-tuning-vmware-server

These changes have improved performance a lot, but the system is still not performing as well as it could running a native windows 2003 term server.

Once again, could you please advise how you enable physical drive write caching.

Thank you.

[Marco Stefanetti]

Hi, I got some improvements removing hp drivers and upgrading to kernel 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5,
cache ratio 75% write, 25% read

This is my last test:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/bigfile count=10 bs=500M
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
5242880000 bytes (5.2 GB) copied, 46.3108 seconds, 113 MB/s


Daniele Palumbo:

Yes, I have 4 active virtual machines and if I run the dd command, all became slower, and the shell is very slow, but working

Pc Doc:

I installed from hp site the following pakages:

cpqacuxe-8.10-2.noarch.rpm
cpq_cciss-3.6.18-23.rhel5.x86_64.rpm REMOVED!!
hpacucli-8.10-2.noarch.rpm
hpadu-8.10-4.noarch.rpm
hp-health-8.1.1-14.rhel5.x86_64.rpm
hpsmh-2.1.7-168.linux.x86_64.rpm
hp-smh-templates-8.1.1-19.noarch.rpm
hp-snmp-agents-8.1.1-22.rhel5.x86_64.rpm

I did't find a command line tool to enable write cache, I go to this url: https://localhost:2381
and then "HP Array configuration utility", common tasks, advanced features, Physical Write Drive Cache


bye

[cleepdar]

Enabling the Drive Write Cache from hpacucli is well documented.

See the document "Configuring Arrays on HP Smart Array
Controllers - Reference Guide"

The command should look something like this:

hpacucli ctrl slot=0 modify dwc=enable

[PC Doc]

Thank you very very much..

We have been battling with this machine for a couple of months now, we were relying on the backup machine for a while as its throughput was greater than the HP.

Final question, are you using SATA2 drives, or SATA1. It appears the drives that come with the machine are only SATA1, or at least limited to 1.5Gb/s. Is this correct, or are they 3.0Gb/s drives that are limited by the card?

Pity HP 2nd level techs couldn't give me this information.

[alexgva]

I've tried what Marco suggested but no luck with me (raid 1+0, 2 x 160GB seagate baracuda 7200, firmware HPGD).
I installed CentOS(64) hoping to reach the 70 MB/s and more but nothing to do... max 33 MB/s
The only difference I can see is the E200 firmware. Mine is 1.80..... Marco Stefanetti is 1.78.
Previoulsy I had tried SLES 10x(32) and the best I could get was 31MB/s (write cache enabled...even 100% write)
With W2K03 I was able to reach 35MB/s when I disabled the windows file paging (write cache enabled, 75% write).......


Now I'm wondering if I should downgrade the firmware if this is possible..

Marco, If you had a roadmap I could try to reproduce and validate your install. This could perhaps help other users.

Any suggestion is welcome.

Alex

[Marco Stefanetti]

*** Cleepdar

thanks, It works:

hpacucli ctrl sn=PA6C90P9SWK1IY modify dwc=enable

but can't use or set slot parameter.

hpacucli ctrl sn=PA6C90P9SWK1IY show

Smart Array E200 in Slot ATTR_VALUE_SLOT_UNKNOWN
Bus Interface: PCI
Slot: Slot Unknown
Serial Number: PA6C90P9SWK1IY
Cache Serial Number: P9A3A0B9SWK8D2
RAID 6 (ADG) Status: Disabled
Controller Status: OK
Chassis Slot:
Hardware Revision: Rev A
Firmware Version: 1.78
Rebuild Priority: Medium
Expand Priority: Medium
Surface Scan Delay: 15 sec
Cache Board Present: True
Cache Status: OK
Accelerator Ratio: 25% Read / 75% Write
Drive Write Cache: Enabled
Total Cache Size: 128 MB
Battery Pack Count: 1
Battery Status: OK
SATA NCQ Supported: False


*** PC Doc

raid 1+0, two identical disks

Physical Drive at Port 1I : Box 1 : Bay 1, Internal
Controller Smart Array E200
Bus Interface PCI Express
Controller Location Unknown
Location Port 1I : Box 1 : Bay 1, Internal
Size 250 GB
Type SATA
PHY Count 1
Transfer Speed 1.5 Gbps
Firmware Version HPG2
Model ATA GB0250C8045
Status OK
S.M.A.R.T. Predictive Failure Events No

*** alexgva

I'm sorry, no roadmap. I installed centOs normally, then, when I got into the slow transfer rate, I began to install and unistall drivers and packages many times.
I can give you any detail of my actual configuration, but, by now, I will not reinstall!!

[Lukas Hubschmid]

Hello.

In this thread, it's only a problem about the write performance ...

How is the read performance of the E200/128 BBWC? Any experience?

Greez
Lukas

[sirrus]

I have this issue too.

E200 + 128MB BWCC

Latest 1.84B firmware

Io Scheduler: cfq (even tried deadline and noop with almost no change)

Very poor write performance (10MB/s) and read performance of 54MB/s), IO Wait 100% and up to 4s (seconds not ms!!!!) write queue delay.

Enabling DWC results in 54MB/s read and 45MB/sec write

The same harddrives as mdraid 1 connected with the HP ML110 onboard SATA - 90MB/s read and 80MB/s write performance....

I will remove my e200 and migrate to mdraid!

By the way - I've installed two new 2TB harddrives. Onbord performance 130MB/s read and  120MB/s write.

On the e200 is poor: 64MB/s read and 50 MB/s write.

To be onest - this is disgusting!