VSA Cluster Nodes with SSD and 7200/MDL

[goldem]

We're currently running a few clusters of 4330's with 10k's and 7200 MDL drives (no AO, completely separate volumes presented to the virtual hosts accessing the data).  We have VM's with compute layer living on the 10k's and data/file VHD's living on the 7200's and are not seeing any issues.  We're considering starting to use VSA's on new hardware with SSD's and 7200 MDL drives, similar to the hybrid shelves but with additional capacity instead of the 10k's for our needs and using AO.

I know the design configurations push for SSD's with 10k drives, but we need the additional capacity MDL's bring.  Is anyone currently running a configuration with the "performance gap" in AO?  If so, how does it perform?  Is the performance difference mentioned more of a potential perceived difference if certain pages for a VHD lives on tier0 vs. tier1, and potentially causing the VM's operations (not just file access) to break or hang?

[ECA-IT]

Hi,

We've been running 7k2 Sata drives (tier 1) & SSD (tier 0) for a couple of years now using AO - never had a problem with performance.. 3 VSAs clustered providing a total of 30Tb (15 usable) of which 10% is SSD

Alaric