esxi 5 sas, sata, pike, raid, drivers, performance & compatability.

[GhostCy]

I have been scouring the net, testing, retesting, and running lab after lab.

My question is one of optimal performance, at the moment of disk writes and reads,

i figure for most things that is one of the biggest priority.

one of my conclutins are, the only way to get disk performance is threw raid.

hyper v supports intel software raid, and thus I have many performance increases when behind that.

I have a asus board with pike support, and am going to buy a raid card, for the pike slot, and really need to know what is and isn't supported, and how much of a differance 512 of cach will make in the long run.

the two choices i have narrowed the feild down to are:

Pike LSI SAS 2008

Pike LSI SAS 2108

the next question is, with raid, will esxi out perform hyper v?

[Dave_Mishchenko]

For the best performance you'll want a RAID controller with battery backed write cache (BBWC).  BBWC gives a significant performance increase over the same storage controller without BBWC.

[GhostCy]

thanks, i know about batteries, but that in n way answers my question.

[mcowger]

Most LSI based SAS cards will work, but unless they appear on the HCL (www.vmware.com/go/hcl) they are not officially supported.

Cache makes a huge difference in write performance, and in my mind should be considered a requirement.

As far as performance - its may, it may not.  HyperV and ESXi have different caching models, so you'd need to test both with *your* application.

[GhostCy]

Thank you very much, your information was helpfull.

,so do you think the lsi 2008 is desent eneugh for a home lab,

or do you think lsi 2108 is worth the extra money

[mcowger]

Well, it depends on the performance you want.  Cache helps a lot, but not a lot of people need great performance on a home lab. 

Its up to you.  You can absolutely run a successful home lab with no cache (I do), but some people want the performance, and some dont.