ESXI & NVME Intel Drives

[ToddW2]

Anyone have any insight, instead of posting twice figure I'd share the URL to my other thread since some don't venture out of here into the HD/SSD section

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1864954


Basically, seems capped @ 860MB/s Read/Write with 800gb P3700 no matter how I set it up. As you'll note I believe I've done all the 'updates' needed to get to the 'good' speed, other than maybe turning on "full power" ie: 25w?? I can't figure that out.

Does ESXI 6.0 use different NVME drivers than 5.5 U2 w/intel latest download (for esxi 5.5)

 

[JasperW]

Local datastores are always going to be a 2nd class citizen in esxi. I think it's really unfortunate that they run basically hamstrung for performance due to kernel throttling it.

However, your performance is pretty great! I've done some testing with SSDs as local datastores and the performance has really been much less than I expected. After engaging both HP and VMware support, I wasn't able to get much enlightenment.

I would recommend running esx top and gathering data out of there during your tests - if you hit d you will get the disk information.

See this guide for explanation of the fields. This may help you identify where the bottleneck is. In particular if your KAVG is high, that will tell you the kernel is throttling you

http://www.running-system.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/esxtop_english_v11.pdf

 

[ToddW2]

For a drive that others benchmark on baremetal near 2GB/s I'd say 800MB/s is very poor.

I was hoping for more than 30mb/s increase with pass-through vs esxi managed datastore, but that's about all I got.

I will try win 8.1 tonight to compare. I didn't want to run it on ESXI I just couldn't get 2012 to install on a normal SSD due to some missing drivers, that I have NO CLUE what is missing I installed USB, SATA, INTEL C612 and others.

I just put in a 400GB Intel 750 to compare to the P3700.

 

[ToddW2]

Intel 750:

Seq Read Q4@64Threads - 857Mb/s Read
Seq Writes Q4@64Threads - 879Mb/s Read
4K READ 46MB/s
4K WRITE 125.1

It's rated for 900mb/s writes so I'd say I hit the write-limit of the Intel 750.

Didn't come close to the read limit at @ QD4.

Upping QD to 128 still didn't change the READ perf. in fact it was identical to QD4.