Hi All,

Currently I am running an Open-E system in testing mode as storage for the XenServer nodes. The current performance of the system bugs me a little, I am very curious to understand what are causing these non-optimal performance results. Or maybe the results are fine, I do not know and would like a second opinion.

The storage server setup
Dell R510
8 GB DDR3 1333 MHZ RAM
12x 300 GB SAS in RAID 10
PERC H700 controller, 1 gb cache, write back enabled
4x Intel PRO 1000 MBIT NIC

Network
HP Procurve 2510 as storage switch
Storage server is connected with 3x 1 gbit in LACP (802.3ad) trunk.
XenServer node is connected with 2x 1 gbit in LACP (802.3ad) trunk
Jumbo 9K frames enabled

From within a VM (4 cores / 4 GB RAM) in XenServer, I run the following dd command to execute a low-level data copy:

Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/tmpMnt bs=1024 count=12000000
Which returns:

Code:
12000000+0 records in
12000000+0 records out
12288000000 bytes (12 GB) copied, 109.673 seconds, 112 MB/s
I suppose some of the speed can be cache on the raid controller. However, when looking on the switch via SNMP, the traffic that flows during the copy action.. 400 mbit (see below). It isn't even close to the 2 gbit that (looking from the nodes perspective) I should have available.



Is this a lack in performance, should I be able to achieve more? Is this a configuration fault?

Any tips / advise would be appreciated.