iSCSI-Performance MSA2012i

[mullfreak]

Hi,
we have a brand new HP MSA2012i for virtualization with Vmware ESX 3.5 Server. We have the 2 controller version and 12 SAS 146GB Harddisks.
Now, im testing the performance with the real-status monitor in the MSA and i copy 20GB Files from LUN to LUN.
First i have two arrays with RAID5 and a global hot spare. I get 30MB/s with my copy-job. Thats to slow i think. Then i create a RAID10 with 6 disks and get 40-45MB/s.
What is the best configuration to get the most performance?
Should i use less then 64k?
We want to have 10-15 server virtualized on the ESX-Servers. Thats Webservers, Data-Servers, and so on. No Exchange, SQL!
Greetings
Markus

p.s. Thx for your answers!!!

[Uwe Zessin]

> Thats to slow i think.

Maybe your copy program does not do double buffering. It reads from the source disk and stores the data in memory. Then it writes the contents to the destination disks. So both sets of disks are idle 50% of the time.

I've run some quick tests against a 4-member RAID-5 vdisk (4x 300GB/15kRPM, chunk-size 64KB) some time ago. Using pure-sequential 16KB writes I was able to push about 50 to 65 MegaBytes per second to the disk drives.

Do your Web- and Data-Servers really deal with files that large?? If not, then I think you should rather test for I/Os per second and not MegaBytes per second.

[mullfreak]

Hi Uwe,
now i test with 2 raid10 arrays, 6 disks in one array. then i create 5 win2003 server from one template at one time and get 78mb/s. hope this is good.
Can you give me a value IO that is good for my hp msa2012i?
Markus
p.s. Können wir uns auch auf deutsch unterhalten?

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

I've tested a MSA2212fc some weeks ago. It was configured with 16x 300 GB 15k disks as a RAID 5. I was able to get >200MB/s with IOmeter (32KB seq. write). You should test with IOmeter or another tool, but don't use a simple copy job for testing purposes.

Best regards,
Patrick

[Robert Campbell_6]

not iSCSI, so don't know how useful, but squential-write on a MSA2012fc with 5x300Gbyte 15k disks in raid-6 via 4Gbit emulex controllers was always in the region of 260-270Mbytes/sec. No other load on the MSA or the machine (DL380G5 2.0Ghz 1066Mhz FSB with RHEL v5.2).

Robert

[mullfreak]

Hi there,
i have made some test with IOMeter and get 1.500 IOs/s with 64k read. Thats round about 94Mb/s.
Thats the best values and now we are migrating our servers to the MSA and the ESX.
Maybe i will delete the second array and make a RAID5-Array for non-performance servers. Then i have the best mix of performance and disk-size.
What is the maximum transfer rate in MB/s i a gigabit network?
Have a nice day.
Markus

[Robert Campbell_6]

I've been getting 98Mbytes per second with 2 fast machines. Must admit though that it was straight-up ftp which allowed me to reach these speeds. Between a DL360G5 and a DL370G6 with 6x 500Gbyte Dual-SAS-port disks in Raid-5 10,000 rpm. They were both running Linux, without VmWare and were connected through a Cisco C3750G-12S switch. Both have Raid controllers with 256Mbytes of cache 50/50 read/write configuration. Transfer test was a database file of 50Gbytes.