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How to estimate fiber channel bandwidth for ESX4 server?
There is an IBM BladeCenter H with 2 Brocade fiber switches. There are 14 internal ports and 6 external ones. Each port is 4Gbps. There is also a fiber channel SAN (IBM DS4700, 15k SAS disk) with 2 controllers. Each controller has 4 fiber ports. Each port is 4Gbps. The plan is to install ESX4 on 2 HS22 blade server. If the blade server runs 10 virtual machines, then each virtual machine can only get 4Gbps/10=400Mbps which is a lot slower than local SATA disk.
Q#1. How to estimate the fiber channel bandwidth between blade server (ESX4) and the fiber switch? Is it practical to average the total bandwidth by the number of virtual machine and compare it to the bandwidth provided by local disk such as SATA or SCSI or SAS?
Q#2. If the fiber channel expansion card is dual port (4Gbps each), is it possible to get 4Gbps x2 = 8Gbps bandwidth for the blade server (ESX4)? If yes, how to configure it without upgrading the Brocade fiber channel switch?
Thanks.
Q#1. How to estimate the fiber channel bandwidth between blade server (ESX4) and the fiber switch? Is it practical to average the total bandwidth by the number of virtual machine and compare it to the bandwidth provided by local disk such as SATA or SCSI or SAS?
Q#2. If the fiber channel expansion card is dual port (4Gbps each), is it possible to get 4Gbps x2 = 8Gbps bandwidth for the blade server (ESX4)? If yes, how to configure it without upgrading the Brocade fiber channel switch?
Thanks.
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Thanks for your posts.
HDTach and HDTune are for workstation hard disks. What I look for is some tool to measure the actual disk access stats on the physical server. With this, I can plan (hopefully) the disk bandwidth for ESX and mesure disk bandwidth of each virtualized server.
HDTach and HDTune are for workstation hard disks. What I look for is some tool to measure the actual disk access stats on the physical server. With this, I can plan (hopefully) the disk bandwidth for ESX and mesure disk bandwidth of each virtualized server.
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ASKER
Most servers use 10K or 15K SCSI or SAS drives instead of SATA drive which can typically provide 3Gbps or 6Gbps speed.
Q#3. Any tool to measure the disk bandwidth usage of the existing physical server?
Q#4. How to calculate the ESX disk bandwidth requirement given all the disk bandwidth usage of all existing physical servers which will run on ESX?