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matt_payne666
n00b
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2013
- Messages
- 13
Hi, everybody... newbie here with a couple of questions for all you VMware experts...
Does anyone use ESXi with non hardware raid, locally attatched disks, if so, what sort of throughput do you get?
What would you suggest in way of disk configuration for my setup??
Heres my setup
2x 2.4GHz Quad core Xeon (no HT so 8 Physical cores, 12mb cache per cpu)
16GB fully buffered, EEC DDR2
1x8GB flash drive
1x120GB Vertex3 SSD
3x3TB 72k Seagate hard drives (4th is in the post) - no hardware raid, direct connection to motherboard.
ESXi boots from flash, SSD is the VM datastore (2x Win2012 machines, 1 Nexentastore NAS)
Ive tried several ways of setting up the disks, but get abysmal write speeds - Physical RDM and a windows storagepool gave the best results - 60MB/s on the disks, but after a rejig, I couldn't get physical RDM's to work, ESXI would destroy the GPT table as soon as I tried any disk access.
Currently the disks are mounted in ESXi and split into two virtual disks each (to get round the 2TB ESXi limit) writing to the disk will start at about 70MB/s then after a few gigs drop to about 10MB/s.
Ive tried freenas and open filer but much the same, disk transfers seem to be about the 20MB/s mark.
These speeds are measured using the windows copy and displayed transfer speeds. copying from VM to VM or from a physical machine to a VM has a similar result.
I hope this makes sense!
Ive just bought a Perc 6i with battery backup and a 4th 3TB disk to see if I can get better speeds - My thoughts on this were to use direct I/o to my nexentastor VM, setup a zfs volume using a spare 60gb SSD for cache and attatching via iSCSI to my main virtual DC - does this sound the best use of the kit??
Does anyone use ESXi with non hardware raid, locally attatched disks, if so, what sort of throughput do you get?
What would you suggest in way of disk configuration for my setup??
Heres my setup
2x 2.4GHz Quad core Xeon (no HT so 8 Physical cores, 12mb cache per cpu)
16GB fully buffered, EEC DDR2
1x8GB flash drive
1x120GB Vertex3 SSD
3x3TB 72k Seagate hard drives (4th is in the post) - no hardware raid, direct connection to motherboard.
ESXi boots from flash, SSD is the VM datastore (2x Win2012 machines, 1 Nexentastore NAS)
Ive tried several ways of setting up the disks, but get abysmal write speeds - Physical RDM and a windows storagepool gave the best results - 60MB/s on the disks, but after a rejig, I couldn't get physical RDM's to work, ESXI would destroy the GPT table as soon as I tried any disk access.
Currently the disks are mounted in ESXi and split into two virtual disks each (to get round the 2TB ESXi limit) writing to the disk will start at about 70MB/s then after a few gigs drop to about 10MB/s.
Ive tried freenas and open filer but much the same, disk transfers seem to be about the 20MB/s mark.
These speeds are measured using the windows copy and displayed transfer speeds. copying from VM to VM or from a physical machine to a VM has a similar result.
I hope this makes sense!
Ive just bought a Perc 6i with battery backup and a 4th 3TB disk to see if I can get better speeds - My thoughts on this were to use direct I/o to my nexentastor VM, setup a zfs volume using a spare 60gb SSD for cache and attatching via iSCSI to my main virtual DC - does this sound the best use of the kit??