VMware esxi 4.0
Openfiler 64 bit - fully updated with iSCSI target
UbuntuVM connecting to Openfiler iSCSI target
One
of the options with VMWARE tools is to use the vmscsi (paravirtual)
driver for the SCSI controller. It offers faster performance over the
standard LSI used by ESXi. I have installed vmware tools on OpenFiler 64 bit successfully. Openfiler is an rPath Linux distro.
In Openfiler I created a 4 drive SW RAID10
array. (4 virtual disks, each taking the entire storage space of each
physical drive.) They are assigned SCSI 1:0-1:3. The SCSI controller for these drives is set to paravirtual. In Openfiler I created the SW RAID array fine with the
paravirtual SCSI controller. The Openfiler SW RAID array is exported as an iSCSI target to an UbuntuVM box.
UbuntuVM iSCSI performance in Openfiler VM:
ddt -t 2g /mnt/openfiler/iscsi1
2048MiB KiB/s CPU%
Write 115367 21
Read 107238 10
Not
bad for the drives involved. (WD Green drives.) The problem is, the
RAID array disappears if I reboot Openfiler. I think the issue is the
SW RAID is initializing before the esxi paravirtual scsi controller
driver.
I can switch the SCSI controller to the LSI one and the SW RAID array shows up and survives reboots without issue.
UbuntuVM iSCSI performance without paravirtualization SCSI controller in Openfiler VM:
ddt -t 2g /mnt/openfiler/iscsi1
2048MiB KiB/s CPU%
Write 42404 8
Read 91767 9
So
I am taking a HUGE write performance hit and pretty big read hit if I
can not use the VMWARE paravirtualization SCSI controller.
Any thoughts on this? Anyone use the paravirtual scsi controller successfully with a Linux software RAID setup. Any idea how I can force the pvscsi driver to load before the software raid in Linux?
Thanks in advance.
PS: I'm not sure if I posted this to the correct location. Admins, feel free to move to a better thread.
