Very sluggish performance testing Nexentastor 3.1.2

Give me the full spec of your ML350 G5

I have one here I can directly compare with.

Mine is

Dual quad core 5345's
20g ram

These I feel are NOT good Solaris boxes I am afraid ....
You will see massive pauses here and there with them.... Mines been frustrating me for a while.

When it works it works good, still havn't figured ou the pauses .....

Here is what I have found tho.

To get the best out of it, you need to have drives attached to the onboard e200 pig of a smart array controller

Seems the smart array gets confused without drives attached, I am guessing using the Solaris drivers.

Mine is configured as a test machine, and for fiddling with all manner of things....

So, try the following

Attach smartarray port one to top 4 drive bays
Pop in 2x72gb drives in the top two bays....press f8 at boot and configure the drives as a mirror pair...
The boot a smart start cd I used v9.20 and configure controller like this

100% read cache
Then enable drive write cache
The only way to get some performance out of the shit e200 controller.
Top two drives mirrored will be your OS installation.

Then hook up your h200 to the bottom 4 drive bays (so you can only play with 4x72gig drives... But it should be a start for your testing) don't install them yet tho...

If you have a spare intel LAN card pop that in and cable it up. Solaris doesn't seem to correctly play with onboard LAN ports. ILO port doesn't work... 2nd port (Broadcom) I recon identifies wrongly.... And doesn't work correctly

Install OS onto mirrored 72gb drives

Shutdown, install 4 other drives
Reboot

Install napp-it If you like and setup your 4 drives in a pool.

Make a share

Copy stuff from windows to the share and report back the copy speed

Those drives are slow tho.... Eg 50mb/s each.... But the IOPS are quite high

.

Hi mate,

Plugging the drives on the e200 would sort of kill what I want to do that is go around any proprietary hardware, Solaris 11 and Nexenta detect all the drives just fine, the problem is when I use nappit. Even OI detect all the drives. I've switched to the windows installation again, SMB does about 110MB/sec to a single disk with write cache enabled, pretty fast for these small 72GB 10k 2.5 inches. Is there any way to disable the onboard shitty e200?

I'm using a intel pro 1000 network card at, don't even get close to the built in one.

I'll hook then 4 drives on the e200 and see what happens,

Give you a shout later on, thanks for the heads up :)
 
The disk-Ids are different (with and without d0 at the end).
What is your output of iostat -Ensr (this is the relevant command)

Was it ever figured out what causes this?

I have a napp-it 0.8h installation where I am connecting two SC216 JBOD enclosures to two LSI 9201-16e's and I am having some drives show up with the d0 and some without.

I found that the drives without the d0 are displayed on the main disks page, but not the Disks Details and Smart Info pages, and similarly are also not able to be added to a pool through the GUI, which nearly gave me a heart-attack at first...

As the disks are there, they can be added via command line though. much like you can still query the disks via command line with the smartctl command.
 
H200 is a SAS2008 based controller yes?

In which case I believe that multipathing is enabled by default on....
Try disabling SAS multipathing and see what drives are announced.

.
 
H200 is a SAS2008 based controller yes?

In which case I believe that multipathing is enabled by default on....
Try disabling SAS multipathing and see what drives are announced.

.

Hi there,

Sorry for taking so long to update this.

I've installed a vanilla Solaris 11 and I've set up everything using command line, no GUI involved or nappit. I managed to create the pools just fine, SMB shares are saturating the gbit network easily.

In the end was not any damn hardware problem, was software indeed.

Nothing has been changed on the hardware of the machine, Solaris worked just fine.

The guys from nexenta never got back to me anyway, even the sales team as I was planning to use the solution for our big clients. For me so far nexenta is a useless product without proper support. I won't pay 5k to have support for something I don't even now that works properly.

Thanks for all your help guys, lets leave this topic closed now :)
 
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