Yep, vmktree.org is down while the server is being upgraded (hw and OS). Will be up and running again sometime during the weekend.
In the meanwhie you can use Excel, LibreOffice Calc, Lotus 123 or similar to retrieve the values. 
Lars
I needed to get some storage for a small business where I work.
We did not want to spend a lot of money, but wanted top performance of course 
. Space was a concern, as we have around 6TB of data, growing by about 300GB/year (or more).
At first we were looking to get a Dell Powervault MD3600 or MD3620 and a 10GE switch plus some 10GE cards.
That was a bit costly - it would have been around 25-30k EUR for 12*2TB or 24*1TB raw space.
Besides that we would have been locked in to Dell providing spare parts, service and possible upgrades in the future.
So I did some research and came up with a plan to build our own storage with Nexenta, a zfs-based storage appliance.
It is based on a Supermicro chassis, Supermicro motherboard, 2*Xeon E5 2609, 256GB RAM. HDDs are cheap nearline SAS drives from Toshiba, 24*1TB per drive at 7.2k rpm which are connected by a SAS expander to a single port SAS controller (LSI 2308).
22 of the drives are in a mirror-stripe configuration (also known as RAID10), the last 2 are hot spares.
The storage box is connected by Infiniband (Mellanox ConnectX-2 QDR) using SRP to 2 ESXi 5.1 and will serve as main storage for 15-20 VMs.
As for redundancy: it was too expensive to remove all single point of failures. I decided it would suffice to get some spare parts in case something dies; we can live happily with an hour or two downtime to replace stuff. Besides we can utilize 1G ethernet as a backup if infiniband goes down and takes the IB switch and most cards with it, also, our server for backups can serve as a new "head" for the storage in a pinch as well.
So far this storage setup has set us back around 15k EUR.
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Throughput-100%Read | 1.07 | 50625 | 1582 | 4% |
| RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read | 93.02 | 634 | 4 | 3% |
| Max Throughput-50%Read | 71.88 | 823 | 25 | 3% |
| Random-8k-70%Read | 91.53 | 643 | 5 | 4% |
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Throughput-100%Read | 1.11 | 49724 | 1553 | 4% |
| RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read | 36.20 | 1613 | 12 | 3% |
| Max Throughput-50%Read | 1.04 | 51132 | 1597 | 3% |
| Random-8k-70%Read | 40.30 | 1441 | 11 | 3% |
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Throughput-100%Read | 1.11 | 48925 | 1528 | 4% |
| RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read | 1.25 | 41147 | 321 | 39% |
| Max Throughput-50%Read | 1.05 | 51345 | 1604 | 3% |
| Random-8k-70%Read | 1.16 | 43747 | 341 | 40% |
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 128k 100% random read | 3.45 | 17098 | 2137 | 34% |
| 128k 100% random write | 22.21 | 2654 | 331 | 5% |
| 128k 100% sequential read | 3.33 | 17731 | 2216 | 34% |
| 128k 100% sequential write | 2.65 | 22040 | 2755 | 3% |
| 1M 100% random read | 26.62 | 2249 | 2249 | 2% |
| 1M 100% random write | 150.84 | 399 | 399 | 3% |
| 1M 100% sequential read | 25.37 | 2350 | 2350 | 4% |
| 1M 100% sequential write | 198.17 | 302 | 302 | 5% |
Mellanox does provide official drivers that support SRP. It was released a week or so ago.
http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?&product_family=36&mtag=vmware_drivers
Driver version 1.8.1.0 is the one you want (or greater, if someone reads this in a few months )
Quote from release notes:
MLNX-OFED-ESX package contains: o MLNX-OFED-ESX-1.8.1.zip - Hypervisor bundle which contains the following kernel modules: - mlx4_core (ConnectX family low-level PCI driver) - mlx4_ib (ConnectX family InfiniBand driver) - ib_core - ib_sa - ib_mad - ib_umad - ib_ipoib - ib_cm - ib_srp
...
- Storage: o NFS over IPoIB o GPFS over IPoIB o SRP
There you go.
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Throughput-100%Read | 0.51 | 48395 | 1512 | 6% |
| RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read | 0.89 | 36656 | 286 | 46% |
| Max Throughput-50%Read | 0.46 | 48343 | 1510 | 3% |
| Random-8k-70%Read | 0.67 | 42661 | 333 | 30% |
| 4k-Max Throu-100%Read-100%Random | 0.43 | 50842 | 198 | 31% |
| 4k-Max Throu-100%Write-100%Random | 4.25 | 12011 | 46 | 10% |
