MSA 1000 Performance Problem

[John Kufrovich]

Denys,
Thanks for sending the information.
Everything looks fine.

Lets look at something else. It will require a reboot of the server. After POST, you will see a msg for qlogic card and have the option of entering the FW.
Ctrl-Q, select it. Locate the Execution Throttle parameter. Tell me what it is.

Can you describe your SAN. How many servers are connected to the msa, any clustering, hba's per server, MSA LUN count
and MSA luns per server.

[Jason Keane]

John,

We got the pre-release of firmware from HP themselves. We had a HP storage consultant onsite who was able to locate it from his own resources and perform the upgrade.

We currently have two MSA controllers one with 4.32 and another with 4.42 (pre-release). These are not installed together but the 4.42 one is simply a spare part that was shipped in as it was believed the controller was the issue.

With regard to the disable/enable the FCA bit, we see no performance increase with Windows 2000 as expected, but rather unexpectately we see no performance decrease with Windows 2003 on either setting!

We run a number of tests on Perf Mon LUN, which would be best too look at?

Not to overstep the line on Denys question/suggestion, but we have tried throttle values of 15 (default), 60, 90 and the max a 255 with only a small change in speeds (i.e. maybe from 10MB/s to 10.4MB/s).

Cheers,
Jason.

[John Kufrovich]

Jason,
Let us compare numbers,
create a 4G test file. At cmd prompt type,
fsutil file createnew PATH:\filename.txt 4294967000

Not sure if windows 2000 has fsutil. If not you can copy from an XP or 2003 machine.

Windows Explorer copies at 64K blocks.

Here are my results
My configuration
380G3, emulex hba
The server has internal RAID 5 lun made of 5 disk.
MSA RAID5 LUN, 4 disk = ~18MB/s
MSA RAID5 LUN, 6 disk = ~27MB/s
MSA RAID5 LUN, 10 disk = ~49MB/s

I copied the from the internal RAID 5 to each one of the MSA LUNs. Several times I copied back to the internal lun. Even though my 380G3 has a 5i(u160), I only got around 15MB/s.

Looking at the above data, for proximation purposes you can figure ~5MB/s per disk in RAID 5 configurations, up to a point.

[kelly trosper]

Jason,

You wrote:
Tesing with IOMETER will prove the read performance as you can do a pure read and IOMETER can be forced to filter the FLUSH command from the SCSI sequence to demonstrate high write throughput.

How do you filter the FLUSH command?

I'm seeing some poor write performance to my MSA 1000...

KT

[Jason Keane]

>I'm seeing some poor write performance to >my MSA 1000...

Ahhh... I'd nearly forgotten about this post.

For those of interest in the end we had to migrate to Windows 2003, as HP argued it was a MS problem and MS argued it was a hardware issue. Didn't really work for me now on 2003 the system is flying along (it is a software issue and the whole debate of spindle speed, etc, is only for squeezing the last out of the disks)

With regard to IOMETER and testing write performance we had to apply a "patch" to the MSA driver before IOMETER would give the high-throughput. The HP engineer supplied this patch so I'll see if I still have it.

Cheers,
Jason.

[Christian Bieletzki]

We are experiencing the same problem and use QLOGIC FC adapters. The registry parameters are the same as in the attachment above except the

"Start"=dword:00000004

one. On our servers it is:

"Start"=dword:00000001

Does anybody have more details about the "Enable Advanced Performance" option? Does it require a reboot? Do one have to enable this for all attached servers on the SAN or can it be per LUN?

Kind regards
Christian

[Jason Keane]

Hi Christian,

Yes, the enable advanced performance option requires a reboot.

Why are you looking at the registy keys. Are you not running Windows 2003? If so the option is available in device manager under the disks themselves.

Jason.

[Christian Bieletzki]

Hi Jason,

yes, indeed. Thank you for that information. I have already seen it but I was asking for the reg values because I was confused why we have only one entry that is differen. I wanted to investigate what this START parameter is for and how it effects the system in changing it. I think that are different things we are talking about.

Regards
Christian

[Simon Leib_1]

Hi Jason,
I'm having the same issue as yourself and have a case logged with HP.
When you said you recieved a patch for MSA 1000, was the patch for the QLogic HBA or the MSA1000 device listed under system devices?
I've updated my MSA 1000 firmware to 4.48 and the QLogic HBA driver to 9.0.2.11 (August 05) but not having any luck.

Any help would be appreciated!