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I have a HP D2700 connected to a dl360G7 with a p812 controller using one SAS cable. The storage enclosure houses 23 SAS 450GB disks with one spare for a raid6 array. It serves as an nfs datastore for 2 esxi servers.

In order to maximize prerfomance what would the best configuration? Is my cabling correct ? Shouldn't i use 2 SAS cables to maximize perfomance and / or get redundancy?

I have been reading on noumerous posts and i am between :

1) ditch the p812 and get an HP HBA H220 controller and zfs with maybe a couple of ssd disks for cache(l2arc).

2) replace the dl360g7 with an spare hp dl360e and a p822 card.I would prefer to avoid it as the dl360e has better perfomance than the g7 as esxi host.

Thanks in advance.

Nicholas Papadakos
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1 Answers1

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I wrote the ZFS high availability guide that describes the use of low-cost HP StorageWorks D2700 disk enclosures.

See: https://github.com/ewwhite/zfs-ha/wiki

As far as your setup, we'll want more details about your goals and expectations.

  • What operating system is in place right now?
  • It looks like you only have one storage server.
  • Dual-ported/dual-path disk cabling won't have an appreciable impact on what you're doing.
  • How are you connecting everything to the VMware ESXi hosts?
  • What is the networking setup?
  • Are you asking whether to use ZFS or not?
ewwhite
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  • hello and thanks for your reply, You guide is very precise, I have come across it many times. I am using centos 7.4 and yes, its a single storage server.The file system for the exported datastore is XFS. The esxi hosts are connected through 1 gb links ( 1 for management and 1 for storage each). The server uses 2 x 1 gb ethernet bonded. I am planning to upgrade the entire network to 10gb. the hosts run about 10-15 vms that run MySQL databases with 3-4 million rows each (they take a performance hit that’s why i am looking for ways to improve disk performance). – Nicholas Papadakos Apr 01 '19 at 23:27
  • Bottom line is, i am asking if zfs would be used to speed up my datastore speed up for my scenario. I have a small budget for ssd and from what i read if i understand it correctly zfs with most problably be a better choice that invest in hp raid controllers with ssd support. – Nicholas Papadakos Apr 01 '19 at 23:32
  • "Speed up" how? Can you identify what or if you even have a performance issue? – ewwhite Apr 01 '19 at 23:46
  • I notice many times on peak hours, the iowait on the storage server increases.And so goes on in the virtual machines. I havent run any benchmarks, i dont know even how to benchmark it correctly as i guess simple file transfer with dd or equivelant wont tell me much. – Nicholas Papadakos Apr 01 '19 at 23:52