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Re: ESXi 5 with the P4000 VSA (Ver 9)

 
5y53ng
Regular Advisor

ESXi 5 with the P4000 VSA (Ver 9)

Hello,

 

Has anyone used the VSA on an ESXi 5 system yet? I have a small cluster up and running, but the performance isn't even close to what I experienced on ESX 4.1.

 

Does anyone know if the VSA is optimized for VMFS 5?

 

Thanks.

 

 

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

6 REPLIES 6
RonsDavis
Frequent Advisor

Re: ESXi 5 with the P4000 VSA (Ver 9)

Did you change anything else? Like perhaps go with a new nic besides the E1000?

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: ESXi 5 with the P4000 VSA (Ver 9)

Hi Ron,

 

The only thing I did was use the "upgrade hardware" option in vSphere 5, so the VSA is now hardware version 8. The VSA is using the flexible NIC. I tried changing it to an E1000, VMXNET(3) but the VSA does not recognize the hardware. I attempted this through the vsphere client as well as editing the vmx file from the CLI. 

 

Converting the virtual machine hardware and using VMFS5 helped out and the read performance is acutally a little better than what I saw with ESX 4.1, but the writes are about the same. 

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: ESXi 5 with the P4000 VSA (Ver 9)

Also wanted to point out that I received some information regarding vSphere 5. Version 9.5 of the VSA/SAN/iQ will be vSphere 5 certified.
RonsDavis
Frequent Advisor

Re: ESXi 5 with the P4000 VSA (Ver 9)

I've kept mine at hardware version 4, since that is what HP is still shipping the virtual appliance at.I did my testing on 8.5, but found changing hardware version and nics was disasterous. My hopes were when 9.0 came out they would support hardware version 7, and vmxnet3, but alas, they didn't update any of the VSA documentation, so who knows.

I'd like to see VMXNET3, hw version 8 and of course VASA and the new VAAI methods in 9.5, but alas, who knows what we'll see. Where did you hear about 9.5? My rep has been silent.

In your first message you mentioned things being bad in vSphere5, and your last message says reads are better, writes are the same. What changed?

An interesting thing to try, as long as you are experimenting would be to turn on vSphere 5's Content Based Read Cache on your VSAs. The VSA itself doesn't cache, it relies on whatever cache exists on the controller. With this feature (unofficially) you can add up to 2G of read cache to the VM. That can't hurt.

http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/08/new-hidden-cbrc-content-based-read.html

 

Steve Burkett
Valued Contributor

Re: ESXi 5 with the P4000 VSA (Ver 9)

9.5 can't be too far away, HP just announced the other day their new Peer-based Storage Federation system which will work with HP 3PAR and HP P4000 systems, but not before getting a software update to allow the SAN to use it. I'm guessing they're wedging this in to SAN iQ 9.5? 

 

 

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: ESXi 5 with the P4000 VSA (Ver 9)

Hi Steve,

 

Per HP we will see 9.5 next month (Sep 2011)