I've installed ESXi 3.5 U4 with and without the latest VMware patches on an HP DL380 G6 server with a p410i RAID controller configured with 8 SAS drives in a RAID 50 configuration. The server firmware (RAID controller and BIOS) have been updated to the most current versions.
Unfortunately, a RHEL4 VM only achieves a maximum of 5-6 MB/s in disk IO for write operations. When I run 2 different RHEL4 VM's simultaneously, the disk write performance is 2.5-3 MB/s each.
I'm fairly certain the HW is good because I've performed a native installation of RHEL5U3 on the server and have used that OS to do a local file copy at 250+ MB/s.
Does anyone have any knowledge of performance issues regarding the HP Smart Array p410i RAID controller and the VMware ESXi 3.5 U4 cciss driver?