How to max. performance to EVA4000 from Win2003 or RH 3?

[Sheldon Smith]

I have a couple Proliant DL385s; one running RedHat Enterprise V3 for AMD64, the other running Win2003 Enterprise x64. Both are connecting to an EVA4000 with QLogic FCA2214 host bus adapters.

I am trying to maximize performance to a single virtual disk. Using IOMETER for testing, as I increase the number of LUNs and worker processes from either system, the aggregate IO rate keeps going up. What can be done with either OS to increase the IO rate to a *single* LUN?

[Craig Howe_1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Sheldon

Have you changed the Queue Depth/Throttling on the HBA? Amongst other things this can help.

Emulex call it Queue Depth and I think its called Throttling on a Qlogic Card. Max is 255 for Emulex and 256 for Qlogic. Since you only have a couple of hosts then this would be fine although a large amount of hosts with max setting connected to the EVA apparently can be more harm than good. I think the rule of thumb was 8 hosts per controller with max setting from what I heard.

SAN Surfer will allow you to change it. Last time the HP site version I tried to download was 0 bytes so you can always get it from qlogic.com.

I would think also that if you have dual 2214's or a dual port 2214DC then you can set load balancing across them? I haven't tried this but I hear that the new EVAs support load balancing.

[Craig Howe_1]

Would also look at the EVA best practice guide to determine best practice for disk groups, vraid you are using, etc.

If you haven't seen this, attached is a screenshot of the summary from this guide.