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02-23-2012 01:28 PM
02-23-2012 01:28 PM
Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver
> can you suggest > 2 TB local RDMs with ESXi 5.0?
I can say that it worked for some basic tests: The VSA starts up, reports the correct amount of space, and we can create and use volumes. I wouldn't say I could "suggest" it since we aren't using that configuration in a heavy workload/production environment yet. We are building out another VSA based cluster and we'll need to make that decision soon.
> do you also recognized the (300+) latenzys with vm version 7 ?
We have not upgraded any of our VSAs to version 7. We *did* see latency symptoms in version 4, but in our case, these were resolved by using RDMs. I suspect the original poster for this thread is experiencing a different root issue than we've seen, but it is interesting that the symptoms are similar.
> did you played arround with the underlaying raid level (raid 5) block size? or did you used always the default blocksize 256k? thanks for your feedback
We left the controllers at their default configuration except for enabling caches. We didn't see much benefit to increasing the blocksize given the overall random nature of I/O in a busy virtualized environment, but we did not spend time benchmarking to prove our thoughts right or wrong. It would be different if we could better predict the most common I/O patterns for a particular group of disks.
Sorry I'm not more help for those questions.
If others have a different perspective on how to best optimize controllers for a VSA environment, please share!
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03-03-2012 02:19 PM
03-03-2012 02:19 PM
Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver
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03-05-2012 07:06 AM
03-05-2012 07:06 AM
Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver
Great news, thanks for the update Braak.
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03-06-2012 05:59 AM
03-06-2012 05:59 AM
Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver
As I'm currently running on some older DL380 G5's this isn't an option for me but what about using direct-path to pass the NICs directly to the VSA bypassing the problem all together?
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03-21-2012 04:23 AM
03-21-2012 04:23 AM
Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver
Having exactly the same issue as the thread starter. Any news on this?
Im using VSA on ESXi5 in a c7000 with ds2200 storage blades and Flex-10. Usualy perfomance is great, but when removing snapshots latency peaks to over 700ms, VMs even disconnect RDP sessions.
How did you change the driver to E1000? Did you change just the driver or the virtual nic of the VSA VM? Is there another way to use 10Gbit Ethernet than VMXNET3? I don't think so...
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03-21-2012 10:20 AM
03-21-2012 10:20 AM
Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver
It doesn't work with all controllers. But you have to use vmfstools to get it to work if it does.
You should be able to google it. It is definitely not supported by vmware.
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03-21-2012 01:50 PM
03-21-2012 01:50 PM
Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver
M.Braak - do you have a vmware incident and/or bug number, that others could refer to if they experience the same issue?
I was hoping that if a fix was forthcoming, it would be included in the U1 which just came out last week ...
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03-21-2012 02:05 PM
03-21-2012 02:05 PM
Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver
I have asked vmware for an update. Waiting for their reply.
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03-21-2012 02:06 PM
03-21-2012 02:06 PM
Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver
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03-21-2012 02:20 PM
03-21-2012 02:20 PM
Re: Performance issues when using VSA on ESX with VMXNET3 driver
Vmware recommended using local RDM? What was the performance issue - related to vmxnet 3 nics described in the rest of this thread, and RDM route was seen as a way of by-passing whatever the issue was?
Huh - so I have not yet had a chance to look over the links you provided, but I'm hoping that one of them contains a list of raid controllers that export GUIDs?
Anyway - I generally HATE RDMs - management of them once you get more than a few is such a pain, and all the perf docs that I have seen show very little -to-none advantage of an RDM over a virtual disk file on VMDK ...
But in the case of a VSA, it seems to me a bit more sensible - you want the VSA to have as direct and unmediated access to the disk as possible, I would think.
Nice post, worth thinking about.