P2000 G3 SAN - DL380 G5 - B-series 4/8 FC switch

[Lars Bo Heuser]

Hi,

We have a big issue with performance when we trying to migrate VM's from one LUN to another.

Setup:

- 3x DL380 G5 (Xeon 53xx, 20GB RAM, 2x 146GB SAS) vSphere 4.0 installed
- B-Series 4/8 FC switch
- P2000 G3 (24x 146GB SAS)

Additional info:

- The vSPhere host servers also has a NFS LUN from a QNAP NAS configured (for test purposes)
- P2000 G3 was ment to replace a MSA1500 which had the same problem. But the issue persists and the P2000 haven't solved anything.

Issue:

- when we cold migrate a VM from a LUN to another on P2000 (also the case with MSA1500)it is very slow (10GB - 12 minutes)
- if we migrate it to NFS LUN (QNAP) it is 3x quicker (4 minutes)
- if we on a VM try to copy a folder from one disk to another (presented via P2000 SAN) performance is as expected (normal)

Facts:

- the problem only occurs when migrating through VMware via FC but not NFS on QNAP which is through a 1GB NIC

Troubleshooting - we have tried:

- replacing the SAN on recommodation
- upgrading B-Series switch to latest firmware (6.2.2d)
- zoning all units on switch (aliases, zones og zone config)
- firmware updating one DL380 G5 server

Summary:

- I have excluded the SAN and the FC switch. The servers are the suspects and more likely the HBA's. But why is it, that three HBA's has same slow performance (2x Qlogic and 1x Emulex)?

I seems like this problem cannot be solved... But I hope that someone out there please can help us with a solution! ;-)


Best Regards
Lars

[Lars Bo Heuser]

No answers

[Justin Boykin]

Do you have the Batter Backed Write Cache installed in the servers? There are documneted perfromance issues with the DL380 G5 running ESX without the BBWC. Here is an example, make sure you have the cache module and the battery: http://www.provantage.com/hewlett-packard-hp-462967-b21~7HPP949E.htm