New Hardware purchase - thoughts?

[asingh]

Dell 2850
1- PROMISE VTRAK E610SD RAID 16BAY 3U Mfg#: PME-VTE610SD
16 - SEAGATE SAS 1TB 7.2K 3.5" HD Mfg#: SEA-ST31000640SS
4 - PROMISE VTRAK SATA MUX ADAPTER 4PK Mfg#: PME-VTSATAMUX4P (needed for Enclosure)
2 - PROMISE .5M EXT MINI-SAS SFF8088 Mfg#: PME-VTCABMS2MS (External SAS Cables)
1 - LSI SAS 3801E 8PORT PCIE 3G MINISAS Mfg#: LSI-LSI00138


Just now trying to determine if I should go with a single/dual port iSCSI card or a Intel PRO/1000 PT Quad Port Server Adapter EXPI9404PT card.


System will be used for VMware datastore. Guest machines will be Linux, Windows servers, from Web servers to DB servers. This is a proof of concept for our lab but very important and used daily and will be pushed.


Looking forward to the responses.

thanks

[jisaac]

Dell 2850
1- PROMISE VTRAK E610SD RAID 16BAY 3U Mfg#: PME-VTE610SD
16 - SEAGATE SAS 1TB 7.2K 3.5" HD Mfg#: SEA-ST31000640SS
4 - PROMISE VTRAK SATA MUX ADAPTER 4PK Mfg#: PME-VTSATAMUX4P (needed for Enclosure)
2 - PROMISE .5M EXT MINI-SAS SFF8088 Mfg#: PME-VTCABMS2MS (External SAS Cables)
1 - LSI SAS 3801E 8PORT PCIE 3G MINISAS Mfg#: LSI-LSI00138


Just now trying to determine if I should go with a single/dual port iSCSI card or a Intel PRO/1000 PT Quad Port Server Adapter EXPI9404PT card.


System will be used for VMware datastore. Guest machines will be Linux, Windows servers, from Web servers to DB servers. This is a proof of concept for our lab but very important and used daily and will be pushed.


Looking forward to the responses.

thanks

In my experience, the key is spindles. It's easy to get terabytes of storage very cheaply now, but if you don't have the iops to keep up with your workload, then all of that space is wasted. I would recommend that in regards to storage, think about your workload as if it were physical. If you would set up a database server with four drives in a RAID10 for performance reasons, you should dedicate a LUN with four drives for your virtual database server to get the same performance. Also, make sure you have enough iops for all of your virtual guest's OS partitions. I don't know how many guests you have and how you plan on splitting up your LUNs across your drives, so that will of course make a difference. 16 drives split between 5 guests is a much different load than 16 drives split between 60 guests. I've found that oversubscribing your "OS partition" LUN leads to poor performance even on guests that don't seem like they're doing much. Windows has a lot of background i/o and if your disks get saturated, they'll stutter and appear to hang for seconds at a time.

With regards to an iSCSI HBA vs. a quad-port NIC - I don't have a strong opinion as far as performance goes. I have some VMWare servers with HBA's and some with software iSCSI through an Intel NIC. VMWare has said that they see future development in the software iSCSI stack, so there may be more performance gains in the future by using software iSCSI. vSphere now does MPIO with the software iSCSI stack, so that puts it on par with the HBAs.

Hope that helps,
James

[asingh]

We are running (very slow now) 2 ESX servers attached to EMC AX150i 4TB and then a cheap readynas with 6TB which is is making our environment super super slow....

2 ESX servers running approx 25 Windows Guests and a couple linux guests.

This will be a big improvement compared to what we have now.