DL360 G9 Centos 7

[giversen]

Hi,

I am a newbee with HPE and I apologize if I have some strange questions.

I got a refurbished DL360 G9 that I am setting up with Centos 7.5. Currently it is running, but I am a bit disapointed when it comes to disk IO performance.

The server consist of the following components

• 2 x E5-2640 v4
• 64GB HPE Ram
• Dynamic Smart Array B140i Controller
• 3 x Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSDs

The SSDs are currently in RAID0 and I get the folowing speeds with 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.img bs=1G count=1 conv=fdatasync

1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB) copied, 3,38732 s, 317 MB/s

How can I improve disk IO performace. Would a P440ar improve the performance? Should I bypass the controller and let the OS take care of the disks?  Any sugestions?

/Giversen

[Jimmy Vance]

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@giversen wrote:

Hi,

I am a newbee with HPE and I apologize if I have some strange questions.

I got a refurbished DL360 G9 that I am setting up with Centos 7.5. Currently it is running, but I am a bit disapointed when it comes to disk IO performance.

The server consist of the following components

• 2 x E5-2640 v4
• 64GB HPE Ram
• Dynamic Smart Array B140i Controller
• 3 x Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSDs

The SSDs are currently in RAID0 and I get the folowing speeds with 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.img bs=1G count=1 conv=fdatasync

1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB) copied, 3,38732 s, 317 MB/s

How can I improve disk IO performace. Would a P440ar improve the performance? Should I bypass the controller and let the OS take care of the disks?  Any sugestions?

/Giversen

---

The B140i is just an embedded chipset SATA controller. The RAID functionality is in the 'hpdsa' driver.  The P440ar is a hardware RAID controller with a cache module.

[giversen]

Ok understood, thank you. I have ordered a P440ar.

I plan to drop the RAID0 config and deply a RAID5 config instead. Is the OS install for the P440ar the same as for the B140i, meaning that I have to interrupt the install process with "e" and write "modprobe.blacklist=ahci inst.dd" etc. or is there anything else to be aware of in the OS install process.

/Giversen

[Jimmy Vance]

---

@giversen wrote:

Ok understood, thank you. I have ordered a P440ar.

I plan to drop the RAID0 config and deply a RAID5 config instead. Is the OS install for the P440ar the same as for the B140i, meaning that I have to interrupt the install process with "e" and write "modprobe.blacklist=ahci inst.dd" etc. or is there anything else to be aware of in the OS install process.

/Giversen

---

No, you will not need to blacklist any modules. The 'hpsa' driver for the 'P" series Smart Array is an open source driver that is in the kernel tree. 

[giversen]

Great thanks for the info.

/Giversen