Would Multi-Site config be slower than single site?

[Jay Cardin]

This might be a stupid question but it feels like since we reconfigured our storage nodes into a multi-site SAN, performance has decreased. Both sites are on the same LAN but will be in different rooms. Connection between rooms is 4 (1Gb) links.

Our setup consists of two SANs in the same management group. SAN-01 is two P4500-G2 (12 disks per node); SAN-2 is four P4500-G1 (12 Disks per node).

Room 1: P4500-G2-node1, P4500-G1-node(1&3)
Room 2: P4500-G2-node2, P4500-G1-node(2&4)

Our LUNS are configured for Network Raid-10; the Storage nodes are RAID-5

So is a multi-site SAN slower than a single site?

-Jay

[teledata]

Jay,

Did you perform any iometer, or collect SNMP performance data before you migrated to multi-site?

I would not expect any slower performance, since Multi-Site is more of a logical configuration than anything else.

Were you performing Network RAID 10 (2-way replication) before you implemented the Multi-Site?

[Jay Cardin]

I wish I had run some tests before the change, I didn't expect a change in performance. I'm not 100% sure the reconfig to multi-site caused this slow dow (we did upgrade to 8.1 to 8.5 and upgraded ESXi 4 to 4.1).

[Shayne Heidemann]

If the latency between the sites is above 2ms(it might be 5ms), you will start to get slower operation if using synchronous replication.