HP MSA 20

[Ritmo2k]

Anyone using this in production that can shed any light on what type of real world capacity/load this chassis can handle? Given it is only SATA 150, I wonder about how far that scale.

Thanks for any insight!

[ascari · Accepted solution]

i use an MSA1500 with an MSA20 hd expansion with 12 hd sata drive. (in light mode)

In my esx farm there are 2 esx 3.0.1 system and an external (physical) Windows 2003 virtual center server.

On my esx host there are 7 VM (4 2k3 srv and 2 xp client)

This configuration is up from one year long and no hw problem or performance problem found.

Now i need attch and configure a new critical bisiness service at the same storage with 2 phisical linux system based (Cluster). I will chage my MSA20 with 2 MSA30 (for fault tolerance reason also) for my remote office. MSA1500/MSA20 is a little system and all we know sata disk MTBF vs SCSI/SAS drive. Sometime you need to look at you budget and ....

Remember; now you can upgrade MSA1500 firmware from active/passive to active/active.

I hope these info you can be useful.

Bye

Alberto

[Ritmo2k]

Very helpful!

Thank you,

jlc

[dominic7]

I had a MSA1500cs with the MSA20 shelf attached ( 12x250GiB) . It scaled to about 30VMs before performance became unacceptably low. The shelf would sometimes disappear causing me to reboot the entire array before it would be seen again.

The MSA1500cs/MSA20 combo was one of the worst pieces of hardware I ever dealt with.

[kimono]

The MSA1500cs/MSA20 combo was one of the worst pieces of hardware I ever dealt with.

Which now has been superceded by the MSA-2000, different kettle of fish all over again.

[piercelynch]

Indeed.. I am not a fan of the MSA's either, think they are a bit useless really.

In particular.. I think a number of the HP MSA's that were supported in 3.0.1/2 are now no longer certified and supported hardware in ESX 3.5. Something definately worth checking out if you are considering upgrading and use MSA's......

P.

[ChristianWickha]

The MSA1500cs/MSA20 combo was one of the worst pieces of hardware I ever dealt with.

Which now has been superceded by the MSA-2000, different kettle of fish all over again.

I completely agree. We also have a MSA1500cs with MSA 20 shelves and 750Gb SATA disks - this is the slowest, most unreliable, most unflexible and frustratingly annoying systems that I have ever had the displeasure to work with.

Maximum logical disk size is 2Tb, so with 750Gb disks - 3 in a RAID5 set, and immediately we loose 250Gb of capacity. Then when it is formatted, we loose another 120Gb per Logical disk. What a waste!