Poor performance on Dell R410 - SAS

[JeronimoVargas]

Hello,

I'm currently evaluating ESXi 5.0 on a Dell PowerEdge R410, but overall performance (mainly disk write) is surprisingly poor.

I'm not sure whats wrong, but I'm getting really low disk bandwidths with Debian (took almost half an hour to install)

My config:

Dual Xeon E5620

64 GB 1333

2 RAID 1  - 2TB 7.2K Near Line SAS

PERC H200 Raid Controller

The VM Converter is uploading an old PE2850 (P2V) at ~300KB/s.

Is this normal?

Is there some way to tune up BIOS/Storage options to improve performance?

Thanx in advance

[JeronimoVargas]

More on the performance issue,

I'm triying to add a virtual disk (eager zeroed - 90GB) to a VM. It has taken an hour to complete 30% of the task ...

This can't be right ...

[golddiggie]

Does the RAID controller have BBWC (Battery Backed Write Cache) or a battery actually connected to it? How many pNIC's do you have in the host? How are the vSwitches configured? For the debian install, were you using a physical disc (on either the host or your system) or were you using an ISO file for the install media? I've found that using ISO files is many times faster than a disc even in the host server.

[JeronimoVargas]

golddiggie,

Thank you for your interest.

I think the PERC H200 does not have BBWC (or a least it doesn't have any options in the setup menu). The server has only 2 2Gb pNics with 2 vSwitches 1 for the VM and one for the Managing Network (shared with iDrac).

Im installing Debian from an ISO copied to the storage.

Thanks again.

[a_p_]

ESXi fully relies on the caching capabiliteis of the RAID controller. If this does not support write-back operation (to be enabled only with BBWC) the disk performance could be really low (~5-10 MB/s). Unfortunately - according to http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/pvaul/topics/en/us/raid_controller?c=us&l=en&cs=555 - the H200 does not have an option to add BBWC.

Regarding to Converter, you may be able to speed up the conversion if you don't need encryption (see e.g.Increasing the cloning performance)

André

[golddiggie]

iDRAC should have it's own port, and IP address (separate from anything else).

Is that two pNICs total (two ports) or four pNICs (four pourts) total??

If you're splitting everything over just two Gb (assuming 1Gb pNIC speeds) then you could have collisions (among other things) going on. I would advise picking up at least a dual, if not quad port Gb Intel NIC and adding it to the host. Split off the VM traffic to a pair of ports. I always go with a bare minimum of 6 pNIC ports even when running off of local storage for VM's. That's a pair for Management (in a test lab, you can bundle vMotion with that vSwitch too, but I prefer to have a pair for that), and a pair for VM traffic.

Having a RAID controller without BBWC for ESX/ESXi is not a good idea. Taking a look at the spec's for the H200 card (http://www.dell.com/content/learnmore/learnmore.aspx?c=us&l=en&ref=CFG&s=biz&~id=hmc_raid_controller), it's a bad selection for use with ESX/ESXi... Look in the Overview section, and see no battery backup option, nor cache size listed. Both items are very important when running VM's. You would have been better off getting the PERC 6/I controller with the battery module.

If the server is new, then see if you can exchange the controller card you got with one that's more suited for the task. Or return it and order a host that will perform properly.

Is this for a test lab or production environment?