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XenServer AIO performance still sucks?

M

m4rm

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 27, 2012
Messages
174
Hi.

I've been looking for hypervisor to replace ESXi in my current build. I was thinking of running XenServer AIO build with OmniOS VM, but found some threads about Xens performance issues in AIO builds (all IO goes through dom0 if I got it right?).

Main reason for change is software raid. I'm going to dumb my LSI 9260-4i HW raid and use a 10GbE nic instead and I'd really like to have hypervisor + storage VM on (atleast) mirrored disks.

If XenServer still sucks, what would be next logical choice? KVM, Proxmox?
 
We haven't heard why 'esxi sucks'. When I did AIO on esxi that was certainly not the case, nor was it for many others...
 
Well ... I figured if XenServer sucks cause AIO is slow, ESXi must suck 'cause he can't do it with his controller.

So if they both worked to support his AIO desires ...they'd both be awesome!!! :D
 
No, ESXi doesn't suck. It sucks that I can't have a software raid for ESXi + storage VM. If I leave both on a single SSD and then run VMs that rely on storage shared by storage VM I'll lose my sleep.
 
Fun aside ... I thought people running AIO would pass through the controller to a VM ...member Gea has a post on it and seems to swear by it .... may be worth a chat at least.
 
Netwerkz101 said:
Fun aside ... I thought people running AIO would pass through the controller to a VM ...member Gea has a post on it and seems to swear by it .... may be worth a chat at least.
Click to expand...

I am passing the contoller(s) to a VM. I have 2x m1015 cards, which go directly to OmniOS.

The real problem here is getting ESXi + storage VM (OmniOS) on mirrored disks because I'm getting rid of HW raid. If that worked I'd be really happy to use ESXi.
 
For normal use it is enough to have a clone of the ESXi/OmniOS boot disk as a cold spare (use clonezilla to clone).
If you need a higher uptime, you can add a ESXi supported Raid-1 controller for ESXi + OmniOS.

There is also a very simple solution with a Sata to Raid-1 enclosure like a http://www.raidsonic.de/en/products/soho-raid.php?we_objectID=7534

This is not as perfect as a good raid-hardware controller with battery and cache but ok,
especially if you use it to hot-clone a bootdisk from time to time and use the second disk only in case of problems.

As you have a good raid controller, why not using for ESXi ?
 
_Gea said:
For normal use it is enough to have a clone of the ESXi/OmniOS boot disk as a cold spare (use clonezilla to clone).
If you need a higher uptime, you can add a ESXi supported Raid-1 controller for ESXi + OmniOS.

There is also a very simple solution with a Sata to Raid-1 enclosure like a http://www.raidsonic.de/en/products/soho-raid.php?we_objectID=7534

This is not as perfect as a good raid-hardware controller with battery and cache but ok,
especially if you use it to hot-clone a bootdisk from time to time and use the second disk only in case of problems.

As you have a good raid controller, why not using for ESXi ?
Click to expand...

I pm'd you couple of months ago about this issue. I ended up testing one of those raidsonic cases but it didn't work as expected, so I decided to buy the LSI card just to get this box up.

I find it somewhat hard to control the LSI card from ESXi. I dont know if it's the free version or what blocking blocking the installation of LSI software. Second, I'm running out of PCI-e slots. My Supermicro MoBo only has 3 slots while I have 2 HBAs, 9260-4i and a Intel 10GbE nic.

I'd really like to run my VMs off a ZFS pool just to learn more about it, snapshot management etc...

//e

I'm also planning on getting bigger SSDs (Samsung 840 Pro or SM843t), but unfortunately LSI doesn't like to work with Samsung SSDs
 
Would this be possible:

- Run ESXi from USB
- Connect 2 small SSDs directly to MoBo
- Create 2 identical VMDKs on both disks, give those to storage VM
- In storage VM, mirror rpool between those VMDKs?
 
Not sure what you mean by 'give those to storage VM'. If you mean 'define two small VMDKs, one on each SSD datastore, and assign each VMDK to the storage VM and have it do a mirrored root pool on those two VMDKs', then yes.
 
danswartz said:
Not sure what you mean by 'give those to storage VM'. If you mean 'define two small VMDKs, one on each SSD datastore, and assign each VMDK to the storage VM and have it do a mirrored root pool on those two VMDKs', then yes.
Click to expand...

Yes, exactly that. Awesome.

This way ZFS should report if one SSD dies cuz VMDK will be gone with it. I wont be able to monitor S.M.A.R.T. but I think I can live with it.
 
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