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ProLiant DL380p Gen8 with ESXi and VSA

 
Per J (WSP SE)
Occasional Advisor

ProLiant DL380p Gen8 with ESXi and VSA

Hi,

 

I have a DL380p Gen8 server with a lot af disks some ssd:s and a smart array 822.

 

I'm going to run ESXi and a VSA on it, should I use SA Smart Cache or should I let the Lefthand VSA do the tiering?

 

/Per

 

 

P.S. This thread has been moved from Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Enterprise) to HP StoreVirtual Storage / LeftHand. -HP Forum Moderator

1 REPLY 1
Sbrown
Valued Contributor

Re: ProLiant DL380p Gen8 with ESXi and VSA

It depends! The tiering is not the same as caching, it is more like a long term solution, where as HP SMartCache is a short-term non-permanent solution.

 

How much SSD (and what type [slc/emlc/mlc]) do you have? Is it redudant?

 

I know with a P4300 G2, Intel X25-M 160gb, I could run 1 SSD, and hot unplug the ssd without any data loss!, this would not be the case with the VSA storage tiering! You would need to run raid-1 (at least) and hope to heck your SSD doesn't give up the ghost!.

 

The main problem was the number of connectors, without using SAS expanders, with 1 SSD for HP SMARTCACHE, you could improve on random i/o (READ only) of 7 15K SAS 450gb drives in raid-5 ! This is with a really old SSD no less!

 

Best way to weigh your options and benchmark the results!