Question

Poor Performance on Netapp 2050 Fibre Channel and ESXi4

Asked by: cps999

Hi,
we just recently added a FC network to our existing 1Gbit NFS on a FAS2050 in active/active mode. We are running three hosts (DL380 G6, dual QC, 72GB RAM, 0 HDD) with ESX4i and two Qlogic 4 Gbit HBA on each host, everything's connected via two Brocade 300 switches.
I'm a bit dissapointed with the preformance of FCP, I moved a VM with two vmdk's from NFS to FC to run performance tests, copying a file from one vmdk to the other returns an average of 60MB/s, compared to about 30 MB/s on NFS. Eventhough this is double the speed of NFS, i was kind of expecting an increase to at least 200MB/s (this is what the Netapp SE said we could expect). Could someone possibly direct me to a comprehensive installation and configuration guide for FCP and ESXi4, or give a hint how to get FCP up and running? We've configured everything according to the documentation that comes with ESXi4 but something big seems to missing.
The Brocade performance monitors show practically no bandwith utilization.

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Asked On
2009-09-24 at 07:32:53ID24758575
Tags

FCP

,

Netapp

Topics

Storage Technology

,

Hard Drives & Storage

,

VMware

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Answers

 

by: meyersdPosted on 2009-09-24 at 15:05:10ID: 25418465

Performance with NFS is limited by two things: network bandwidth and the number of disk spindles. With fibre channel you've removed the network bandwidth limitation so you're now looking at underlying disk performance. How many drives are in the aggregate that your LUN is in? If you have the base unit, Then you may have as few as five drives - in which case the array is doing pretty well. Use 120 IOPS for 10K drives and 180 IOPS for 15k drives. For both, use 8 - 12 MB/s as a  basis for calculating the performance you can expect.

 

by: cps999Posted on 2009-09-25 at 05:12:27ID: 25422164

Hi,
thanks for your reply, we have 20 15k 300GB SAS drives installed, 12 drives running on controlle #1,  8 on controller #2. The LUN we're running the tests on is

 

by: meyersdPosted on 2009-09-25 at 14:48:50ID: 25427559

Have you got hot spares assigned? That would leave you with 11 and 7 drives. Assuming you are using RAID DP, that's effectively 5 and 9 drives. The performance is about right for the smaller group and a little on the low side for the larger group. You'll need another shelf of disk if you need more oomph.

 

by: meyersdPosted on 2009-09-27 at 03:50:42ID: 25433537

Thanks! Glad I could help.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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