Hello,
Recently i have purchased a new Intel Server ( SR1612UR platform) with INTEL RAID RS2BL040. I have installed a 40GB SSD Cache Drive (called CacheCade).
The server has 2 xeon 5620 cpu, 32 gb ram and 6 1TB SAS 6GB/s drives configured in RAID 10 (2 virtual drives, each 1,3 TB)
The bios and raid controller are up-to-date with their firmware.
I have ESXi 4.1 U1 with all the latest patches.
I have installed 3 VMs , Windows 7 x32, windows 7 x64 and debian 6 x64.
For benchmarking i used iometer on windows and stress on linux.
The results are very strange. As soon as i start the test on all 3 VMs, one machine has maximum perfomance with about 600 commands/s (according to esxtop) and the other two are very low, even 0 at some point.
As soon as i stop the fast VM, one of the other two takes over the resources, crippling the remaining VM.
If i run the same tests without the SSD cache drive, the load is distributed evenly to all VMs.
Any one have any ideea why the server behaves like this? Is there a special setting that has to be done on the RAID controller?
Could the cache be too small/slow for the array.
