Hardware Recommendations?

[rogerk]

Hi,

we have build our system in april-may.
Hardware is redundant:
Mainboard Supermicro X8DT3
Chasis SC836
CPU 1xIntel Xeon 5550W
RAM 24GB (6x4GB)
Raid Controller Adaptec ICP Vortex 8165BR with BB 256 Cache
HDD 16x Western Digital 1TB Raid Edition 3
NIC Intel 10gbe CX4 Dual Port

Switch
2x HP 6400cl CX4

we have 2 Citrix XEN Server as "Client"
Hardware 2xIntel Xeon 5550W with 32GB RAM and Intel 10gbe CX4 Dual

Performance Windows 2008

with write cache on: ca 90000 io/s
with write cache off: ca 25000 io/s

Performance with Citrix XEN (windows 2008 guest):

with write cache on: ca 66000 io/s
with write cache off: ca 15000 io/s

there was no differenz between raid 10 and raid 6 !

so we use raid 6 iscsi for our production system.

the perfomance measure was taken with sqlio and the folowing parameters

sqlio -kW -s60 -frandom -o64 -b4 -BH -LS -Fparam.txt
d:\testfile.dat 2 0x0 10

for xen we make some special config.

we also tested dss with 2x Xeon X550w and 48GB RAM , but the system seems to be slower with that config.


so i hope this will help you.

regards
roger

[1parkplace]

Thank you, I will investigate the cost of this setup,

Which SuperMicro board did you get exactly? I see there are many models, X8DT3, X8DT3-O, X8DT3-F-O, X8DT3-F???

[1parkplace]

Also roger, I was not able to find the Adaptec 8165BR, did you mean the 5165BR? http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support...aid/ICP5165BR/

[rogerk]

hi drew,

you are right. i mean the 5165br and the board is the x8dt3.

[Robotbeat]

rogerk, what sort of performance have you been getting with larger test file sizes? Like, twice or thrice as big as your ram?

[rogerk]

1 thread writing for 20 secs to file d:\testfile.dat
using 4KB random IOs
enabling multiple I/Os per thread with 64 outstanding
buffering set to use hardware disk cache (but not file cache)
size of file d:\testfile.dat needs to be: 41943040000 bytes
current file size: 4194304000 bytes
need to expand by: 37748736000 bytes
expanding d:\testfile.dat ... done.
using specified size: 40000 MB for file: d:\testfile.dat
initialization done
CUMULATIVE DATA:
throughput metrics:
IOs/sec: 147.68
MBs/sec: 0.57
latency metrics:
Min_Latency(ms): 5
Avg_Latency(ms): 369
Max_Latency(ms): 7260
histogram:
ms: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24+
%: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 100

this was a 40GB File from our exchange 2003 on citrix xen.
what a performance do you aspect?

regards
roger

[1parkplace]

Ouch, those results seem fairly bad to me... Especially the latency.