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Simon AllawayFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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HP Proliant ML350p Gen8 disk raid array performance running VMware ESXi 6.5 and Veaam Backup

Hi

Have a problem with regards to performance on the Server and backup and replication failures.

I Have a HP Proliant ML350p Gen8 Server running ESXi 6.5 with a 7 x HPE 450GB 6G SAS 10K rpm SFF 2.5'' SC Enterprise with one Hot-Swap Hard Drive RAID 5. The Array hosts the OS and 4 VMs (SBS 2011, Terminal Server 2008, Powerchute APC Appliance and a VCenter Appliance.)
Total capacity 1.68TB with aprox 400GB Free space 128GB Memory

I am having performance problems where it comes to Veeam backup and replication and have been told this is down to disk speed by Veeam due to the VSS writers.

Currently backing up the HP Server to a ReadyNas box for both backups and replication jobs. The NAS box then replicates to another NAS. I also have a cloud backup solution to Mozy Pro just for additional protection.

My idea was to create a second RAID utilising the additional drive bay with 7 x 2.5in 450GB 15k SCSI drives with a separate raid card (Not sure if I should use RAID5, RAID6 or RAID10)  and then mirroring then new RAID to the RAID5 or rebuilding the existing RAID 5 to match the suggested new RAID and then backing up to the NAS box.

I have to be careful though as I don't want to loose to much drive space as I can expand the 2 windows VMs should I need to.

Any help much appreciated

Thanks

Si
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Simon Allaway
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Can i introduce a SSD for logs files for the RAID5 ?
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Hi Andy

My plan was to do a hardware mirror of the RAID5.  Don't think this would improve performance but should it not give more resilience should i have a few disk failures?

I also think the battery has failed on the raid card so was going to replace this.  I currently have a P420i controller.  Can you convert raid5 to raid10 online or would I have to rebuild the array?  Also how much space would I loose moving to a raid10 config?

I like the idea of adding a ssd as a read cache with a smart cache license.  Is that hard to implement?


Thanks for answering

Simon
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Member_2_231077

You can't mirror the RAID 5 in hardware, whether you have one or two controllers.

P420i does not have a battery, it has a supercapacitor and they don't tend to fail; there is a firmware issue though where they get marked as failed so I would flash the firmware and ensure that the write cache is enabled. If the cache is disabled that would explain the performance issue as RAID 5 without cache is dead slow.

You can convert RAID levels on the fly using acucli commandline under VMware (or reboot and start it off using the graphical ACU under Intelligent Provisioning, then boot back to VMware. Performance is even worse during RAID level migration but that's temporary, it happens in background so the server can still run even if you used the ACU. With RAID 5 you lose one disk to parity, with RAID 10 you lose half the space. RAID 5 is not recommended any more due to it failing to recover from disk failure due to bad blocks on other disks but with your sixe disks it is OK.

I haven't set up smartcache but I believe it is trivial to configure.
HI Andy

So do you think it would be a good idea to drop to:

Option 1

Do a backup of the VM's while they are turned off using veeam then delete the RAID5 add the spare hot swap drive then rebuild using raid 10 using all disk available (8 in total no hot swap).  Restore VM's?
 
Option 2

Get a addition back pane for to add additional drives.  Buy more 450GB SAS drives Plus 2 drives hot swap.  Add these to the RAID 5.  Then convert to RAID 10.  Then add a number of SSD drives for the read cache?

How do I configure the SSD's?  Ar these part of the RAID10 or are these independent?

Regards


Simon

PS funny you mentioned the firmware problem as I only ran the latest SPP on friday
Maybe post some version numbers and exact error messages, funny?
Avatar of Gerald Connolly
As already said, RAID-5 is now a no-no for use in the enterprise! Use RAID-6 or RAID10.

If the write cache is disabled due to the battery fault bug in the firmware, then the write performance will be bad

Make sure you plan the data flows, as reading and writing the data through the same controller/RAIDset will slow everything down big time. Just the cache contention should give you an idea!