StoreVirtual Storage
1748051 Members
5103 Online
108758 Solutions
New Discussion

Re: Evaluating HP P4300 G2 7.2TB SAS Starter SAN iscsi performance

 
Erick Arturo Perez
Frequent Advisor

Evaluating HP P4300 G2 7.2TB SAS Starter SAN iscsi performance

Hi there, I have (3) HP P4300 G2 7.2TB SAS Starter SAN (part BK716B) and would like to get some input for experts in this forum regarding evaluating performance on these P4300 using ioMeter or any other tool you can recommend. The idea is that we want to know how much is pumping our P4300 and see if there is room for improvement or if we have an improper setup.

The information regarding setup is this:

 

The SAN

(3) P4300 7.2TB SAS units connected via 2x1Gbps Ethernet to Ethernet Switch HP 2910-24G al Switch (J9145A). All P4300 are configured in RAID5 Hardware, no jumbo frames, IP Configuration is ALB.

 

The Chassis

1xHP C7000 with 4xBL460c blades(666157-B21)

Each Bl460c has no additional modules for networking, just the onboard netcard. 

1xHP BLc VC Flex-10 Enet Module Opt(455880-B21) (some not-related things run at 10Gbps but the P4300 at 1Gbps)

A configured downlink between the Bl460c and the Flex-10 module was labeled iSCSI and assigned 4Gbps bandwidth.

 

The connection to outside

The Flex-10 module has 4x1Gbps ethernet connections to the switch HP 2910-24G where the P4300 are connected to.

 

We are able to stop all communications in the C7000+P4300+OutsideWorld to perform testing. I am no expert on ioMeter and some test that i have found on the internet sometimes contradict each other on the type of test running. If someone think that i should use other software, please let me know.

The Blades BL460c are running Win2012+HyperV and will run win2012 file servers, a couple of databases mostly sharepoint, 2 exchange server and some other servers. This setup WILL NOT run VDI,Appv or related apps.

 

I thank you in advance for any guidelines that can use to test P4300 with ioMeter or any other related software.

 

Thanks,

 

 

P.S. This thread has been moevd from HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage to HP StoreVirtual Storage / LeftHand. - Hp Forum moderator

 

6 REPLIES 6
oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Evaluating HP P4300 G2 7.2TB SAS Starter SAN iscsi performance

there is no one test to rule them all silver bullet that you are looking for.  iometer is a nice tool in that you can tune it to match very closely to your actual workloads and then test your gear to see it it performs as it is supposed to, but if you are looking for this forum to provide you with a single stat for you to watch for you are wasting your time.  If you are really surious about the performance you should talk to your sales engineer and he can guide you through some configurations but really only you should know what your data profile is and what is most important to you.

Erick Arturo Perez
Frequent Advisor

Re: Evaluating HP P4300 G2 7.2TB SAS Starter SAN iscsi performance

I agree with what you are saying. However doing a simple copy operation from one node to the P4300 I have transfer speeds of 35-40Megabytes/s. So I was trying to find the bottleneck on my setup. I know there is no single magical test with iometer, however there must be one kind-of-standard to test the performance of the iscsi setup.

 

oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Evaluating HP P4300 G2 7.2TB SAS Starter SAN iscsi performance

well if you have 512b cluster sizes that transfer speed would still be pretty good.

 

use CMC and watch your I/O, your que length and latency for each node, for the cluster, and for each LUN as well as watching the LUN stats on the initiator computer as well.  If you can, watch the switch for its % utilization at the port to figure out if you have your frame sizes setup correctly and make sure flow control is enables across the connections.

 

beyond that, the transfer speeds you should could be normal or could be slow.  a 1Gb link can do ~125MB/s fully optimized, but thats assuming you are optimized and if you aren't, it can cap out slower.  First thing I would do after collecting those stats above (assuming nothing jumps out as a problem) would be to verify that you have all your settings configured according to the manual.

Erick Arturo Perez
Frequent Advisor

Re: Evaluating HP P4300 G2 7.2TB SAS Starter SAN iscsi performance

Many thanks, will collect data and psot back.
Sbrown
Valued Contributor

Re: Evaluating HP P4300 G2 7.2TB SAS Starter SAN iscsi performance

baseline with 1, 2, and 3 servers. post your results.

 

Also remember flow control on the ALB BOND! and 2910al

 

RAID-5 is too slow.

 

I have found the VSA is faster since you can roll your own gear. 

 

DL380 G6 dual L5639, 24gb of ram, 2 raid controllers, dev/prod on each server , 10gbe nic's. Intel S3500 ssd (16gb). About $5000 each unit (two or 3 units) - DESTROYS the P4900 all ssd setup with two units $10K.

 

ESXi 5.1 free works fine for VSA - so no charge there. 

 

The only major purchase might be a nice used $1300-2500 24 port 10gbe switch.

 

Since it is a VSA, it is a valid configuration and you can even run light vm's on the same server.

 

With two servers, each VM on the same server will hit 50% of the time to local storage.

 

I have 4 lefthands physical, 3 of them with raid-5 and gigabit and 2910al-48 flow control network raid-1 ran about as fast as one server standalone linear read/write but way faster in random iops.

 

aka 3 P4300g2 in cluster with raid-5 and network raid-1 is slower than the one server setup the same running DAS.

 

If you had 9 P4300 G2 you would get decent performance.. 

 

It's great for slow reliable but no good for fast.

 

They need two things to happen:

 

1. Network raid-5 only - ditch raid on the servers. jbod on servers, network raid-5. 

 

2. SSD acceleration on each host - cohesive caching using RAM and SSD to buffer bursts of reads/writes.

 

3. 10gbe or infiniband 40gb support.

 

plus thin reclamation/compresion (vaai, rle zero block supression).

 

That would put the lefthand above the 3PAR solution, so I hope it happens - I'm not sure it will.

 

just my opinion only

Prakash Singh_1
HPE Pro

Re: Evaluating HP P4300 G2 7.2TB SAS Starter SAN iscsi performance

Hi,

 

For StoreVirtual/P4000 SAN solutions querries you can also visit the HP Guided troubleshooting tree.

 

Below is the link for HPGT:

http://h20180.www2.hp.com/apps/Nav?h_pagetype=s-905&h_lang=en&h_cc=us&h_product=304617&h_audience=smb&h_client=s-h-e010-1&h_audiencerestrict=true&lang=en&cc=us

 

I work for HP

 

Regards,

PS
To assign points on this post? Click the white Thumbs up below!