anyone using the EqualLogic PS5000e?

[smoke455]

I'm looking for some feedback on the PS5000e. We kind of got burned on our first SAN for ESX last year so I'm hesitant in purchasing a new one. We are currently running our own homebuilt SAN using IET on a Dell PE2900 with 15k SAS drives. This has worked very well for us, but at 600gb of space we quickly reached out limits.

So we are looking at the PS5000e with 16x500GB SATA drives to give us the space we need, but I'm concerned about going with SATA. The first SAN we tried was a SATA based SAN and was plagued with I/O problems. I know EQ makes good stuff, but I'm hesitant to go this route if our main file server will be using this SAN as well.

Due to the price of the SAN we'll most likely be stuck using the software iSCSI initiator to the 2 Dell PE2950 hosts.

Any thoughts, suggestions, etc would be appreciated

Thanks

[williambishop]

I have heard from fellow SAN guys that the PS5k is a nice box...but my first question is what kind of array did you buy last time that you got burned on. It looks like you're telling us that it was a home grown setup...Is that correct?

If so, what were your issues? I ask because we had a similar experience long ago, and it turned out to be a configuration issue, and you may be able to utilize the system, at least in a tier 2 type fashion if it's not up to san snuff.

[smoke455]

the first SAN was by a company that swears they are just months away from ESX certification. That was a year ago and they still aren't. The SAN units are great when attached to Windows servers, but with ESX it just doesn't work. ESX would take up to 5 minutes to connect to the iSCSI SAN on boot, and would close its connection to ESX in the middle of the night during low disk activity. Further digging into the system revealed they didn't include any battery backed write cache on the controllers. When I asked about this they said I didn't need it as long as I was using a UPS... my first clue their engineering staff wasn't going to be any help.

Once we started trying creating backup images of the vm's things got ugly - we ran the iometer test that was floating aroung the message board a while back and our performance numbers were horrible; avg response time 310ms, 190 avg i/o per sec, 1.5 avg mb per sec, compared to the IET box; avg response time 36ms, 1635 avg i/o per sec, 13 avg mb per sec.

I built the IET box on Suse Linux to get away from the other vendors SAN - the IET SAN has been very rock solid, but the box is full and it lacks any kind of redundancy.

Our heavist I/O boxes are yet to be moved to ESX, i.e. file server, mail server, sql so I/O concerns are top of the list for us.

[williambishop]

If you're determined to run iscsi, then you can't go wrong with equallogic. I believe it might have some issues with dual sites and it doesn't scale linerally, but you'd have to be putting in a LOT of space before you hit either need.

I've not heard from other san admins any unhappiness with equallogic, so that's a good thing.

[mrgrid]

If you like the 2950s, LeftHand Networks builds SAN nodes out of those, or you could also build a virtual SAN using your existing 2950s with LeftHand's Virtual SAN Appliance. If you want to try it out (free 30 trial) you can download it from their web site.

[williambishop]

Agreed. I like that you can configure for site failure as well with the lefthand, and I know it's stirring a hornets nest, but I've heard from fellow monkeys that it does scale linerally, and further. I'm looking at buying a small setup for testing(3T or so) to determine if I might have future use for it(we're all FC now--but the writing is on the wall, FCoe or NAS is the future).

[smoke455]

our 2950's only have 140gb SATA drives in them so LH really isn't an option for us

[aguacero]

We are currently an EqualLogic shop. On our box, we are hosting VMware, Exchange Cluster, and File Cluster. We are not experiencing any major IO issues. Within VMware, we have some Exchange Front-ends, SQL Server, Sharepoint, Citrix, Web Services, as well as various Application Servers. We bought another PS5000 box for a new site where we plan to have VMware host our domain controllers (dns & dhcp) , and file services for the local branch. It's highly recommended.

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[BenConrad]

Yes, we have them running VMWare and some Exchange. Have you figured out what the average IO size and IOPS you need are? If it's a large amount (more than a few thousand) you may not be best served with SATA disks. In that case you would want multiple PS5000e's (which do scale linearly) or a PS5000X.

Ben

[doubleH]

I have 3 x PS100E's in my environment that run great. 2 are RAID50 and load balance between each other and the other is configured for RAID10. I use it for VMware that is hosting DC's, File/Print, Oracle, WSS, WSUS, AntiVirus, Citrix, WDS (RIS)

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[mrgrid]

Yes, sounds like VSA isn't an option unless you upgrade your controller/drives. LeftHand does sell integrated storage systems as well, one of them based on the 2950, the model number is NSM 2060.

[Anders_Gregerse · Accepted solution]

If performance is important to you go for the SAS disks, but keep things in perspective, find out what you need (IOPS and capacity), don't believe that a 2950 can do the same IOPS as a 14 drive Equallogic or any other serious storage vendor, but Equallogics problem isn't scaling, but the price each step costs. Lefthand gives you a cheaper scaling since it's internal disks and not a whole box everytime. I'm using Equallogic and I'm satisfied with the performance, easy of use and support and thin provisioning is a great help in an ESX environment. To get an idea of how it scales when adding a second box have a look at . The thing I like most about Equallogic is how I can migrate from one box to another. Let's say you can't afford two boxes and you tradein the current box for a bigger or faster one. You simple add the new box, wait some time (it will distribute the data across them) and then "evict" the old one (where it then will migrate the data on the old box to the new one). I know you can use storage motion, but if you wan't to keep some physical boxes on iscsi you have no off-hours migration. A lot of vendors offers new boxes but seldom an online migration from the old san to the new san (with purchasing a pricy replication license if possible)

[smoke455]

we're a small shop - avg 75 users on the system daily. We've gone over the I/O and IOPS and outside the backup window we never hit a thousand. Moving e-mail, file server, and SQL to the mix will up those numbers but right now I don't see it shooting all that high.

[Anders_Gregerse]

Just plan for at least a year into the future, expect IOPS demands to rise by some degree unless it's easy to get money for another one. We are about 200 users and have both a SATA and a SAS based Equallogic box. I've moved most of our SQLs to it (including our datawarehouse).

[smoke455]

thanks everyone

[williambishop]

My favorite aspect to the equallogics is the ability to just move drives around and it knows where each one is and has no availability issues. That is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

[Tporter]

Don't do it! We ran some tests with virtual servers and some vDesktops. The iSCSI interface no matter what the vendors tell you just does not work well. The IOPS are the killer. The gigabit interface alone is ok. The problem comes in when you have multiple random I/O functions taking place with virutal machines and the iSCSI interface on top of that and you get a really poor perorming result. Go fiber channel and find one that can do read/writes really fast. We purchased one from Atrato Inc. . Absoltely amazing in performance and it uses 15% of the power the other SANS does!