Hi. I just wanted to pass along my experience that I had recently setting up shared storage using the Dell MD3200 SAS appliance.
Setup:
VMware ESXi, 5.5.0, 1746974
Image Profile Dell-ESXi-5.5.0-1746974-A04
2 Dell T420 Hosts with 6Gps HBA SAS Controllers
1 MD3200 SAS appliance 4disk RAID 5 with hotspare
1 8TB LUN
I was experiencing very high disk latency (~100-200ms) and couldn't understand why. My entire setup was HCL approved, etc.
Turns out the issue was with the mptsas driver version on the Dell image that I was using (see above specs). I reinstalled the host using VMware ESXi, 5.5.0, 2068190 with the Image Profile ESXi-5.5.0-20140902001-standard
The Dell driver was version 18.0.0.0 and it sucked balls.
The vanilla driver from the stock Vmware image, version 14.0.0.0, worked like a charm.
I wanted to post this here in case anyone else had a similar setup.
