MD3000i and MD3200i performance difference

[NiharVM]

Hello,

We have 2 different setups at different locations:

1. md3000i with 10K 400/450gb sas disks, latest firmware adn 2 hosts with ~30VM's (esxi 4.1)

2. md3200i with 7.2K in-line sas drives 1TB, 1 host and ~10 VM's (esxi 4.1)

Please see that attached screen shot. The hdtune number a server in  #2 is close to 900mbps while at #1 is barely 35mbps. I do understand  that location 1 is much more loaded than #2 but still the performance  difference is massive. Both locations have similar gig switches.

Any ideas. I know there are a lot of unknowns about our setup but I  am hoping someone can see the massive difference and hopefully point out  something big we are missing or is it just the case that location 1  iscsi pipe is more utilized than location 2 hence the lower performance showing on a VM at loc1

Thanks in advance!

[AndreTheGiant]

Storage load (but more disk load) can make a big difference.

Also I do not know how many spindles do you have and which is the RAID config of them.

What is true, is that the MD3200i is a new model (I think to remember also with more cache) with 4 paths for each controllers... so could be faster and scalable than the old MD3000i.

Andre

[NiharVM]

Thanks for the reply. Both SAN's have LUN's configured on 3 disk RAID5 arrays.

[AndreTheGiant]

3 disks can be few for several VMs.

Try to repeat the test when the MD3000i is not under load.

And check that it has latest firmware level.

Andre