What is the right HBA driver?

[wendling]

Hello,
How can we choose the right driver for HBA's?
HP download site offers scsi/storport/bfs with different versions.
What will be the best driver for FC2242SR? (windows2003/eva4000/noBFS)

[Steven Clementi · Accepted solution]

Generally speaking, the storport is the driver you want to try to use unless you have some specific need to use the slower/older technlogy scsiport driver.


What applications will you be running on the server(s)?


Steven

[wendling]

Thank's for the answer.

The servers dl380 g5 will run ERP/oracle applications and it seems that performance are less than the old NT4 server with local disk.
Gerard

[Steven Clementi]

What driver are you using?

Also, what is your Disk Group configuration on the EVA?


There are a lot of factors that play into performance.


Steven

[wendling]

We tried the latest bfsdriver and strorport driver (5.1.20a7) downloaded from hp site . We have a single disk group with 8 disks on a unique enclosure and tried vraid1 and vraid5 vdisks (with read and write cache enable)

Any other idea?
thank's
gerard

[Clint Placette_2]

I have to ask what is a unqiue enclosure? What model EVA?

You will increase your performance if you add more spindles to the disk group. The more the better at some point you will hit a I/0 ceiling.

[wendling]

it's an eva4000 2C1D XCS 6.0 (only one shelf with 8x146 Gb fc disks)
The first SQL querys are slow compare to an old nt4 server with smart 5300 (about 4 times). But second identical query is faster than the NT4 server (i think when data is in cache)
Thank's for your help.
Gerard

[Mike Bollman_1]

A couple of things here just as an fyi.

Be sure to install the MS storport hotfix (KB# 916048), otherwise you will have data integrity issues.

Also, hard set your FC ports to your speed instead of auto-negotiate.

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

It might be useful if you could detail the exact differences between the old and new systems...

We know the new data is on an EVA4000 and the old attached to a 5300 array, but what other differences...?

Are there other systems connected to the EVA ?

What speed drives ?

What spec. servers ?

From what you've said, it sounds reasonable that you should be expecting a performance boost, however there are many variables...

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob

[wendling]

Thank's for the replys.
Things are more complicated:
Windows 2003, oracle 8i, the SQL query called "c10" takes 2-3 minutes the first time (40s when data and index on a local sata disk), second time this query is executed it takes only 1-2 seconds.
Here is an evaperf output during first query. It doesn'i looks like the eva is saturated so what could be the problem?
thank's
gerard