Poor harddisk performance with LSI 1064e SAS controller

[Profion]

We use a IBM Blade H21 (8853-E3G) with two internal SAS harddrives connected with the internal LSI 1460e SAS Controller.

And now the Problem: The mentioned harddrives doesn't provide data with more than 6 MB/s under ESXi 3.5 Update 2.

With other operatingsystems, the controller makes no problems; we have only poor performance under ESXi.

Does anybody have the same problem (... or a solution?)

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Welcome to the VMware Community forums. Your post has been moved to the Performance forum.

Dave Mishchenko

VMware Communities User Moderator

How are you testing the speed and is this read / write? Are you able to access storage that provides a battery backed write cache?

[Profion]

Hello and thankyou for your fast response.

The performancetest has been done with:

- VMWare Infrastructure Client

- dd under Linux installed as a guest system under ESXi (dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/sda/hugefile ...)

The writing performance is about 6 MB/sec. The values between VMWare Infrastructure Client and the Linux guest differs only marginaly.

In this IBM Blade, the LSI SAS controller doesn't have a battery buffered write cache. We only have this problem with the built in LSI

controller. 3 other SAS harddrives connected with a IBM ServeRaid-Controller operate with normal performance.

[Aleksandar_Mace]

I do have the same problem (FSC server with ESX 3.5 Update 2). The file transfer from one folder to another on the same disk, its done with less then 6MBps, but if i am making a copy to some network location it is done with more than 20MBps. Can anybody explain me too.

The data rate of 6MBps, is measured from the VirtualCenter ->performance tab (where the read & write data rates are separated), also it could be seen by Microsoft XP administrative tools ->Performance

[snantel]

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Support Request #12150692803, regarding Storage connectivity issues on your ESXi 5.0 hosts. Based on our last communication,  the LSI 1064E controller is not supported and is incompatible on ESXi 5.0 hosts.

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