Esxi aio using windows server2008r2

H

Hammer!

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 25, 2011
Messages
155
Hi, I am trying to set up an AIO using ESXi 5.0. My system is a dual procession Xeon with 48 GB of memory, an Areca 1880i RAID card with 8 3TB Hitachi 5K3000 drives, all in an Intel Chassis with an Intel S5520HCT motherboard.

I have set up Windows Server 2008 R2 with hardware pass through of the Areca card and that is working very well. I can copy files to and from other PC's on the lan to this VM at very good spreeds (approx. 85MB/s according to Windows, on average), and to stress the system, I have copied over 2TB's of data without a problem.

My problems occur when I install WHS 2011 as a second VM on ESXi. At first, I tried to install WHS 2011 in it's own datastore on a separate hard drive (off the Areca) connected to the motherboard sata port (ICH10R controller). This gave me very poor performance, and in fact, I was only able to complete the install after numerous tries given how slow it was (disk access I assume). Therefore, I created some iSCSI targets in the Windows Server 2008 R2 VM to act as the OS and data drives for WHS 2011. This "worked" much better as I was able to install without a problem. However, when I tried to copy files to the WHS 2011 shares, the copying would do ok for the first 5 minutes or so, but then eventually, it slows to a crawl.

Any ideas why? I am tempted to install another 2008R2 VM to see if it is a problem with WHS, but have not had a chance to do so. Ultimately, I do need WHS for it's remote access capabilities.

For those curious, I am using Windows 2008 R2 instead of other OS's to "serve" the disk space because I require the simplicity of the UI and it is nice to be able to manage the array from within Windows. No one here is familiar with Linux.

Thanks very much for your help.
 
what exactly do you mean by AIO in this case?
on this forum we typically mean this: http://napp-it.org/napp-it/all-in-one/index_en.html
it's more similar to Solaris than Linux, and if you can, try to use that guide.
there is a web interface which makes it super easy and once it's set up, you shouldn't have to touch it again.

in windows, what type of filesystem did you format the array as?
is windows server installed on it's own hdd or is it installed on the array?
 
Unless I am missing something, I am trying to accomplish the same idea except instead of using OI or SE plus napp-it, I am using Windows Server 2008 R2 to "serve" the disk space.

Windows Server 2008 is installed on a datastore which resides on an SSD plugged into a sata port on the motherboard (ICH10R). All filesystems (WIndows, Areca Arrays) are formated NTFS.

I just installed another Server 2008 R2 VM and it is copying fine. So it appears my problem is with WHS 2011, but I don't understand why that would be the case since they are basically the same code base. Any thoughts?

Thanks!
 
WHS does it's own thing. More than that though, 2k8 makes a lousy storage target :p
 
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