EMC SAN: SATA vs SCSI disk

[shane_presley]

We will be using an EMC SAN fiber-attached to our hosts. We have some trays of SCSI disk, and some lower cost trays of SATA disk.

Are there any benchmark tools to help determine how a VMFS file system will perform on each? I'm hoping we can use the SATA disk. Each volume will have about 10 VMs running on it.

Thanks, Shane

[azn2kew]

Here's a performance chart to compare.

You can always use your SATA and SCSI disks for your VMFS too and there are several good tools like Openfiler and Lefthand Network Virtual SAN Appliance which will use your existing local disk storage but will be slow in performance.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems LLC.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[azn2kew]

You can use IOMeter tool to test your storage I/O

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems LLC.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[azn2kew]

You can also download IOZone from www.iozone.org for more details loaded in Linux box and test it.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems LLC.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[ejward · Accepted solution]

Are these disk in a Clariion? When we were looking for disk to do Vmware on, EMC said we should use fiber disk rather than SATA. We got SATA drives for our Clariion anyway. We figured EMC was trying to make a buck. The Clariion wasn't exclusivly for Vmware. There was other stuff on there too. We had a problem with data curruption. Nothing I saw on the Vmware side but, we had files shares on there with images that were just scrambled. EMC upgraded us to fiber drives free of charge. Has EMC ever given anything to anyone for free? There must have been something seriously wrong with the STATA drives for them to do that. They pulled everything back (Including controllers) to send to engineering. They never told us what they found. This was just last year.

[vm4you]

We perform some bench between trays of SCSI disk (300 Go FC) / SATA disk (750 Go) on HDS USP/VM / ESX 3.5 / San 4gbit/s ...performance are quite similar for us with a random read workload (mostly big SQLServer read request).

[mcowger]

That probably has something to do with the extrmely large amount of cache on the USP series.

--Matt