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P4000 VSA physical RAID recommendations

 
Adam Little
Frequent Visitor

P4000 VSA physical RAID recommendations

I've been searching around the web, but stil haven't managed to find any recommendations/best practices for the physical RAID on the P4000 VSA.  I've done a lot of work with the P4000 series hardware, but not as much with the VSA.

 

Our setup is:

DL380p Gen8 (x4) w/ 8x 900GB 10K SAS

SA P420i

RAID5, 5.7TB

StoreVirtual VSA, LeftHand OS 10.5 (x4)

 

The default strip size for the RAID is set to 256KB, but I've seen others recommend 128 or even 64.  Obviously, the workload will be random with the VSAs in place (and we're using VMware too), but I'd like to make sure we're getting the best performance out of them.  Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

 

 

Thanks!

3 REPLIES 3
oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: P4000 VSA physical RAID recommendations

it all depends on your underlying hardware and your data profile.  You have a lot more flexability with the VSA for setup.  In the end, the VSA will handle whatever your hardware can take.  I run 64k hardware raid because that is what LSI seems to like w/ cachecade and fastpath, but YMMV.  If you have the time, just setup test and then tweak until you find the best thing for you.  I believe the VSAs "format" their data for 4k clusters on the drives they are presented.

RonsDavis
Frequent Advisor

Re: P4000 VSA physical RAID recommendations

I was told once by a support engineer that they use 64k. Take that with a grain of salt though. 

We should be able to boot one up with gparted and find out. 

 

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: P4000 VSA physical RAID recommendations

Use the CLIQ to query your volume information "getvolumeinfo."  In the output it says the blockSize is 1024K. Is that the chunk or stripe size?