0

I am an apprentice at a company in Switzerland. We have a testing / learning environment for us, which consists of multiple physical servers. There are two physical Microsoft Hyper-V servers that are in one Failover Cluster, connected via iSCSI to a HP MSA G3 P2000, where the vhdx drives reside on. The VMs in it are extremly slow. They are Windows Server VMs and all show 100% disk activity all the time (or most of the time). I know the problem is the HP MSA G3 P2000, but I recon it was somewhat faster when the SAS Disks were in. But now that they were replaced by SATA HDDs (5400 RPM) the VMs are unbearably slow. What is the problem?

  • 5400 RPM
  • The fact that its RAID 6
  • HP MSA G3 P2000 is outdated

What would be easy steps to better the performance without having to buy SAS drives which are too expensive? I read on some forum that SSDs wouldn't last very long in such a usecase (they said one week or so..). Am I missing something very basic from the configuration perspective?

The SAS drives were, by the way, taken away from us, because they were needed in production.

duckbjarne
  • 13
  • 4
  • **SATA HDDs (5400 RPM)** - This is the problem. There is no solution other than to purchase faster hard drives. – joeqwerty Feb 21 '22 at 19:12

1 Answers1

3

All of the above.

There's no good reason this system should have SATA disks in it. SAS is required for the dual-controller failover functionality.

If you were to use SATA disks, they should at least be 7200 RPM.

This array solution doesn't have much in the way of cache and the current setup is unsuitable for performance use cases.

ewwhite
  • 197,159
  • 92
  • 443
  • 809