beinguseless

This is partly a continuation of a previous post which I described my Esxi 3.5u5 I/O problems. Since that post I’ve searched google and read in the vmware community forums for any known performance issues with Raid 1E in a four drive configuration compared to Raid 10, checked if there was a known problem with the controller card itself I’m using (LSI SAS3442E), and also proper disk alignment with virtualization which is something I’ll probably revisit once other matters are taken care of.

A point I didn’t mention in my previous post is that when I first purchased the raid card I checked the firmware and updated it as people should. This was around the first of the year and was version 1.26 of the firmware and version 6.24 of the bios, LSI Logic packages them together for ease of upgrade for the user. Good job to LSI on that one. A couple days ago I went back to their site to check for any updates and I happily saw there was, firmware v1.28.02. I’m not sure of what the new bios version is since I didn’t write it down from the screen after flashing and it’s not readily available from LSI’s support site, but since as I mentioned packaged together it’s in with the firmware download. Anyhow, v1.28.02 came out May 5th and scrapping bottom as to what to do I wasted no time in downloading it and prepared for the update.

I created a standard dos boot disk from windows on one floppy and put the firmware files on another. I don’t have a floppy drive in the server but I do use a handy usb based floppy drive. I plugged it in, updated the boot options in the motherboard bios and it was up and running. It did error a couple times on not finding the ‘command.com’ file on the firmware disk but I negated that by copying the one on the dos boot disk to the c:\ drive that gets created in memory. Then when the error came up I could leave the firmware disk in the drive and reference the file on c:\ drive. A couple adapter/chip selections and confirmations later and the new firmware is loaded.

Upon the server booting I find the nearest file on my windows home server virtual machine that’s somewhat sizable to copy to my local machine just to see if there is any noticeable gain. I find a 1GB file and see the MB/sec in the windows transfer window be about 25-35MB/sec. A smile instantly comes to my face. Checking the network utilization that’s hovering around 45% on a gigE adapter. About half way through the file the speed drops to a piddly 2-3MB/sec. I think it has something to do with my local machine since the hard drive light was still ticking pretty steadily. I cancel the transfer and move onto something a little more scientific.

I booted up a separate vm I use for software testing, which is an XP SP3 x32 build set to use an LSI Logic controller type within the vm settings. I re-run the same tests (again referencing my previous post) and for ease of reference below is the before results, taken from the previous post, and after results which are currently the latest.

Before

After

The first thing the jumps out at me is the ‘Max Throughput 100% Read’ test with how much it dipped. The others are about equal and since I did only run these once (I don’t have time to average out 3 5min tests on each) it could be within the margin of error for these. I do know one thing, and so far within the real world test of transferring files the difference is as clear as day in the direction of being a great improvement.

I’ll give it a little more time and general usage before I fully make up my mind on this but I am very hopeful. I think the next change would be upgrading to ESXi vSphere 4 (aka ESXi 4.0), I think the LSI Logic drivers have used have been updated.

I’ve been setting up a new home server to host a few vm’s and noticed along the way the poor performance I was seeing from the server.  For an initial rundown of the specs:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
CPU: Penryn E8200 2.6GHz
Memory: A-DATA 8GB DDR2 800
Storage: LSI SAS3442E
Network: gigE

At this time the RAID configuration I was running was RAID 1E with three WD 750 WD7500AACS hard drives.  The mentioned “poor performance” was a combination of the following.  Transfer speed from another computer on the network of about 3.5 MB/s from a Vista (64bit) physical machine to Windows XP sp3 32 bit virtual machine, downloading updates for another windows xp virtual machine, while trying to listen to mp3′s from a virtual machine to a physical machine the song’s buffer would cut out and sometimes end the song altogether and move to the next, and sometimes data transfers would stop mid-transfer and simply “complete” without an error but that data did copy or move.

Having spend a fair amount of time troubleshooting hardware and performance issues before for desktops and servers I turned to the usual suspects of CPU, memory, network, hard drives (aka I/O).  I cut all activities (moving files, listening to MP3′s, etc) testing one at a time and adding one systematically to see if it was a particular one causing the trouble.  I used the very handy ESXi Performance tab within the ‘Infrastructure Client’ to gauge system performance.  I/O stood out as the culprit and I chalked it up hard drives I was running, which you may have noticed are Western Digital’s “Green” line.  This means that rather than running at a full 7200rpm it stayed mostly at 5200rpm increasing as needed.  The benefit here is that it draws a lot less electricity, and I already had them on hand when I built the server and were hoping they would be sufficient.

Having it narrowed down to I/O I turned to the knowledgable VMWare Communities I came across the a thread (a newer thread was made since it was getting so long, accessible here) of people posting specific I/O performance using IOMeter and based on the IOMeter configuration file found there I ran some tests of my own.  (These test’s were all performed in Windows XP sp3 32bit, as well as the other IOMeter results later shown)

The numbers above caused my jaw to drop and over the following couple days from then pondering what to do I saw a sale Dell was having on Western Digital “Black” hard drives model WD1001FALS.  Unlike the Green drives these were made with performance in mind.  So I ordered up four of them in 1TB with the intention of configuring them up in RAID 10.

Days pass, I get them in, install them, and set them up in RAID 10.  In short order I move the same virtual machines to the new datastore and re-run the same IOMeter test to see the results.

I was astounded, and rather frustrated at this point.

I turned again to the VMWare Community and saw a couple scattered posts about choosing different ‘SCSI Controller Type’ based on the SCSI/RAID card that’s being used.  Checking the type in use I see it’s ‘BusLogic’, which I thought was odd since I’m most certainly using an LSI card.  The BusLogic setting is what ESXi created for me when setting up a new virtual machine and not something I was prompted to choose.  I proceed to change the SCSI Controller Type from ‘BusLogic’ to ‘LSI Logic’ for the previous configured vm but that resulted in nothing but blue screens with instantaneous rebooting once the blue screen was reached.  I conceded to creating a new vm and reinstalling Windows XP sp3, with changing the SCSI Controller Type after the wizard of creating a new virtual machine and the results were…

Certainly better than what I was getting previously and I don’t have the same issue’s mentioned previously.  I am not thrilled by any stretch about the write performance and the read transfer doesn’t hit that high outside of the test.  I don’t have a number offhand but its not even close to that, its under 10MB/s.  At this point I’m not sure right now what the next step may be.  Is it a limitation in ESXi since it is the free version?  Is it the RAID card?  Physical to Virtual data transfers (Vista to XP) cap’s out at about 6 MB/s with a more consistent speed of about 4.35.  Certainly nothing to get excited over but it is stable and I’m not having the same issues.

The point of this is if you are deciding between BusLogic vs LSI Logic there is most certainly a difference and one should test prior to adding virtual machine’s to make sure the best is chosen.