VSA Performance?

[Paul Hutchings]

OK seems I have a dilemma. We like the P4000 but having had pricing it's a mixed bag in that getting the performance we want for our VM's, mail, SQL etc. is achievable (we've been offered a ridiculously good deal on a 14.4tb virtualization bundle).

However I also need around 10tb (and possibly growing) of file server storage and by the time you add that on it's potentially getting expensive.

Given the Virtualization Bundle includes 10 VSA licenses, I'm left wondering how good or bad performance I'd be likely to get if I threw three or four DL180's loaded with 12 MDL spindles and dual RAID5, so more or less a P4500 node other than the VSA/vSphere environment.

Am I mad to consider it?

Any quick answers would be appreciated as I've been stuck waiting on pricing for a while so now it's in I need a plan.

[Reginald Swensen]

I am running 4 nodes of VSA 8.5 on DL180V6 machines with P410 controllers (512m battery backed ram) and 12 1TB SATA 7200 rpm drives. I have the VSA's running on ESXI 4.1 (free version) and have 9 TB usable space of RAID 5 on each unit. I have been getting throughput to most of my servers (on separate VMWare boxes) in the 70 to 90 Megabyte/sec region with IOPS reported by the CMC of up to 1500 on the cluster with no sign that it was distressed in any way. I have not set up a test to stress the boxes to their limit but have seen no particular problems in routine production use. This cluster provides mostly shared drive storage for a MS Active Directory Domain with about 700 active users. I am about to buy 4 more DL180s to double my capacity... hope that helps