ejefferson213
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Poor VMware Performance
We have a Dell PowerEdge T610 running ESXi 5.0.0 (build 914586) having:
• 64G RAM
• Dell Perc H200 SAS HBA (for tape)
• Dell PERC 6/I Integrated with 4-600G SATA drives set up with 2 RAID 5 arrays
We needed to make the following changes:
• Remove the Dell Perc H200 card (and move it to another server)
• Replace a failed hard drive
So after gracefully shutting down the two VMs running, we shutdown VM. I then removed the card and rebooted the server. Now I wish I could tell you exactly what messages appeared at boot time but from what I can recall, the system was aware that one card had been removed. And then when it saw the Dell PERC 6/I card, messages were displayed that concerned me. Some reconfiguration would take place and I wanted no part of that so without acknowledging any prompt, I simply powered off the system. I then reinstalled the same card into the exact slot and powered the system back up. And the messages I saw at boot time led me to believe that all had returned to normal.
When the two VMs started, performance was abysmal. I looked into the event log and saw many:
Lost access to volume … due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress… Followed by a success/recovery message.
It was so bad that I couldn’t use the system and I can only surmise that what I did screwed up the system somehow, but how??????? Does anyone have any ideas what I can do to recover my system? Thank you very much!!!!
• 64G RAM
• Dell Perc H200 SAS HBA (for tape)
• Dell PERC 6/I Integrated with 4-600G SATA drives set up with 2 RAID 5 arrays
We needed to make the following changes:
• Remove the Dell Perc H200 card (and move it to another server)
• Replace a failed hard drive
So after gracefully shutting down the two VMs running, we shutdown VM. I then removed the card and rebooted the server. Now I wish I could tell you exactly what messages appeared at boot time but from what I can recall, the system was aware that one card had been removed. And then when it saw the Dell PERC 6/I card, messages were displayed that concerned me. Some reconfiguration would take place and I wanted no part of that so without acknowledging any prompt, I simply powered off the system. I then reinstalled the same card into the exact slot and powered the system back up. And the messages I saw at boot time led me to believe that all had returned to normal.
When the two VMs started, performance was abysmal. I looked into the event log and saw many:
Lost access to volume … due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress… Followed by a success/recovery message.
It was so bad that I couldn’t use the system and I can only surmise that what I did screwed up the system somehow, but how??????? Does anyone have any ideas what I can do to recover my system? Thank you very much!!!!
Last Comment
ASKER
Thank you for your posting! The rebuild finished days ago and drives show optimal. One thing I did see is that, under vSphere client, the adapter type for my PERC 6/i card is SCSI vs. Block SCSI (that I think it should be). Might that be the problem?
the disks were always connected to the integrated PERC, and not the H200
ASKER
Correct, the Dell PERC H200 is for a tape backup system and the drives are on the Dell PERC 6i adapter card. I'm afraid that by simply taking out the card and reinstalling it, the system "got confused".
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ASKER
Chalk this up to another mystery never to be solved. I opened a case with VMware and their analysis pointed to a bad drive, motherboard or RAID array. Having just replace a few disks, I opted to replace the RAID array; same results. So I rebuilt another virtual machine to replace the one that wouldn't start (or actually ran very, very, very slowly), and it works fine. Somehow, the virtual machine mush have gotten whacked and was pounding against the disk subsystem. Fortunately the VM was expendable. Thanks for your help trying to resolve this. The only other thing I could add is that they (VMware engineers) used TOP to see what the top processes were and then some command to zero in on the disk subsystem and saw large wait times when the VM machine started up.
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either will cause poor performance on the datastore until RAID rebuild has completed.
RAID rebuild could take 12 hours to complete.