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natewilson
Contributor
Contributor

Status of using SATA on ESXi Hosts?

I have been using SATA drives with Intel SATA controllers on a few lab test hosts. It seems to work well, ESX recognizes the disks which are usable as local datastores. But, on one host I noticed very poor performance after using it for a while.

I vaguely recall reading similar reports of SATA disk slowdowns here, but never a conclusive output on whether it was a SATA issue. I searched for info on this, but didn't turn up anything.

I realize the SATA controllers/drives are not on the hardware compat. lists. But, I am just trying to use them for lab testing, so I am okay with that. I'm mainly interested to find out if there are known problems with SATA drives and/or any recommended steps to help them work better.

Also, it seems like the vSphere release will have broader SATA support. Does this change when that is released?

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5 Replies
Goodspd
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

In the present SATA in not supported with ESX, this will be supported in next version that soon will arrive Smiley Happy

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kjb007
Immortal
Immortal

There is limited support for SATA controllers, but your mileage will vary depending on which controller you are using.

-KjB

VMware vExpert 2009

vExpert/VCP/VCAP vmwise.com / @vmwise -KjB
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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

One thing to note with ESX(i) is that storage I/O is not cached. So if you need good performance then you need a controller with battery backed write cache. Intel controllers like the ICH models work fine for a few light VMs but performance won't be good if you load up with disk I/O. vSphere is still in private beta and the participants are still under a NDA so you won't be able to get details on that just yet.

natewilson
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for the responses. Those are helpful.

But, judging from the responses, I guess there is no known/definitive problem that would cause performance issues.

So, I will feel better about ordering a couple more low end SATA-based servers for simple testing in my lab.

Thanks

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Jackobli
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

But, judging from the responses, I guess there is no known/definitive problem that would cause performance issues.

As Dave says, there is no caching on the "os side". So you are stuck at the controller and the disks.

SATA is usually "only" 7'200 RPM and thus the access time is quite low (compared to SAS/SCSI). This means you may use SATA (if on a supported controller) but on heavier load (databases, file services) you may see a bottleneck.

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