I'm still fairly new to esxi but have made some significant progress. Heres my setup
EVGA x58
I7 3.06 Ghz
12GB DDR3
4x WD 1TB HD in a RAID5 config
3Ware 9650se with custom oew.tgz
8GB Centurion Flash (hypervisor)
I setup two datastores on the array
I currently have 6 VMs
x1 Windows XP pro 32
x2 Win7 Ultimate 64-bit
x1 Win7 Ultimate 32-bit
x1 NT4
x1 SBS 2008
I first noticed a problem with esx losing connection to datastores. At first it would loose connection on both datastores then reconnect succesfully after about 45 secs.Found that RAID had degraded and began rebuilding itself. Once the rebuild was completed there were no more lost connections to the datastores. I began reading about File System Alignment issues regarding some OS file systems. Could this cause a high latency when data is being read/written to the drives? I've been watching the Performance of the Datastores, Disk, and Storage adapter graphs like a hawk. Here are the average read/write latency for each.
DATASTORE: READ / WRITE(ms)
VM1 6.256 / 89.367
VM2 7.317 / 98.894
DISK: READ / WRITE (KBps)
disk1 1134.664 / 1640.089
disk2 50.827 / 1988.994
STORAGE ADAPTER: READ / WRITE(ms)
VMHBA 1 7.11 / 116.6
My question is do these averages appear normal? Could a File system misalignment cause the RAID to degrade and cause performance issues?
Also I tried to migrate all VM's to one datastore so i could fdisk one datastore at a time to reset VFMS system. But for some reason it took 5 hours to transfer 25% of one VM. That just doesn't seem right to me.
As always I really appreciate the communities help! I've learned so much from everyone already!