StoreVirtual VSA vs. StoreVirtual 4330

[Mike7]

Hello - We are currently using SV 4330 appliances, but are considering migrating to SV VSA.  To start out, I'm looking at VSA 10 TB licenses and three HPE Proliant DL360 Gen9's with these quick specs:

- Dual Xeon E5-2640V4 2.4 GHz. procs

- Smart Array P440ar with 2GB FBWC

- (8) 1.2 TB - 10K RPM SAS 12Gb/s disks

- 256 GB RAM

- Gb NIC's (2 would be dedicated to iSCSI)

- 32 GB flash SD for ESXi boot partition

Any ideas on how these would compare performance-wise to the 4330's?  I'm mostly asking about adequate performance using all spinning disks (all the example's I've seen have a mix with SSD's), and if nesting VM virtual disks on top of virtual disks for the VSA hinders performance?  Our current 4330 nodes all have (8) 900 GB 10K RPM 6Gb/s SAS disks.

Thanks...  Mike

[Stor_Mort]

Hi Mike7,

You will see less performance from the VSA configuration because of the virtualization overhead. The advantage is being able to run additional VMs on the converged platform. 

Be sure to allocate sufficient vCPU (4) and vMEM (18GB) resources to the VSA to prevent any contention. Configure the VSA bulk storage as a raw device. Dedicate at least 2 NICs to iSCSI traffic. Follow VMware recommendations for best performance.