ESX 3.0 slow I/O with MSA1000

[Kirk Holliday]

I am running ESX 3.0 on two Dl380 g5's each server has 4 vmware servers. I have a MSA1000 with one MSA controller. Currently both servers have two hba's that are connected two the 2/8 San switch in the MSA1000. These servers are running in a clustered configuration. One of the vmware servers on one of the host is an SQL server and all I am attemptng to do is transfer files over my 1gb network from to the vm sql server. I am experiencing very slow throughput.

Any thoughts

[James Muell]

Remember that VM portions all the server resoures like memory and disk i/o. Since your running all instance traffic through 1 MSA (160mg/p/sec) the bottle neck is most likely the MSA controller. I don't remember if VM is supported on the MSA Active Active firmware v 7.0 but if it is, one solution would be to upgrade the fw and split the load across 2 MSA controllers. You can only write so much data p/sec in this situation, gig network or no.

[Kirk Holliday]

Thanks, this what I thought.