I'm attempting to use an LSI 9212-4i4e in IR mode with ESXi 6.0. I have configured two Western Digital RE 320 GB drives in RAID 1.
Firmware on the controller is P20, and I also loaded the P20 drives from the website.
There is no on-board cache on this controller.
Drive activity lights were blinking while the drives were initializing, and of course write performance was horrendous.
Writing anything caused the drives to thrash, and sequential writing speeds (testing with dd) reached no more than 2 MB/s.
After several hours (drives left to their initialization over night) the initialization appears to have finished and the drive activity has quieted down. Drive activity lights are no longer constantly blinking, and remain mostly quiet unless I initiate a write myself.
However, the sequential write performance is still absolutely terrible. Write speed has only doubled compared with when the drives were initializing, reaching approximately 4-5 MB/s.
The drives are still thrashing constantly when writing to the volume.
I've tried to remove and recreate the vmfs volume. The result is the same.
Writing 150 MB (from /dev/zero) takes 30+ seconds. Reading back the same 150 MB takes 4 seconds.
Writes: 4.5 MB/s
Writes: 37 MB/s
[root@esxi6:~] date; time dd if=/dev/zero of=/vmfs/volumes/vmstore2_raid1_wd_re/out.tmp bs=1048576 count=150
Tue Mar 22 10:04:45 UTC 2016
150+0 records in
150+0 records out
real 0m 33.20s
user 0m 0.08s
sys 0m 0.00s
[root@esxi6:~] date; time dd of=/dev/null if=/vmfs/volumes/vmstore2_raid1_wd_re/out.tmp bs=1048576 count=150
Tue Mar 22 10:06:23 UTC 2016
150+0 records in
150+0 records out
real 0m 4.05s
user 0m 0.10s
sys 0m 0.00s
[root@esxi6:~] date; time dd if=/dev/zero of=/vmfs/volumes/vmstore2_raid1_wd
_re/out.tmp bs=1048576 count=300
Tue Mar 22 10:07:35 UTC 2016
300+0 records in
300+0 records out
real 1m 12.24s
user 0m 0.15s
sys 0m 0.00s
[root@esxi6:~] date; time dd of=/dev/null if=/vmfs/volumes/vmstore2_raid1_wd
_re/out.tmp bs=1048576 count=300
Tue Mar 22 10:08:55 UTC 2016
300+0 records in
300+0 records out
real 0m 7.63s
user 0m 0.22s
sys 0m 0.00s
cmd: esxcli storage core device list
naa.600508e00000000071e6339d7559b40d
Display Name: LSI Serial Attached SCSI Disk (naa.600508e00000000071e6339d7559b40d)
Has Settable Display Name: true
Size: 304222
Device Type: Direct-Access
Multipath Plugin: NMP
Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.600508e00000000071e6339d7559b40d
Vendor: LSI
Model: Logical Volume
Revision: 3000
SCSI Level: 6
Is Pseudo: false
Status: degraded
Is RDM Capable: true
Is Local: false
Is Removable: false
Is SSD: false
Is VVOL PE: false
Is Offline: false
Is Perennially Reserved: false
Queue Full Sample Size: 0
Queue Full Threshold: 0
Thin Provisioning Status: unknown
Attached Filters:
VAAI Status: unknown
Other UIDs: vml.0200000000600508e00000000071e6339d7559b40d4c6f67696361
Is Shared Clusterwide: true
Is Local SAS Device: false
Is SAS: true
Is USB: false
Is Boot USB Device: false
Is Boot Device: false
Device Max Queue Depth: 128
No of outstanding IOs with competing worlds: 32
Drive Type: logical
RAID Level: RAID1
Number of Physical Drives: 2
Protection Enabled: false
PI Activated: false
PI Type: 0
PI Protection Mask: NO PROTECTION
Supported Guard Types: NO GUARD SUPPORT
DIX Enabled: false
DIX Guard Type: NO GUARD SUPPORT
Emulated DIX/DIF Enabled: false
[root@esxi6:~] esxcli storage core device raid list -d naa.600508e0000000007
1e6339d7559b40d
Physical Location: enclosure 0, slot 6
Physical Location: enclosure 0, slot 7
cmd: esxcli storage core device vaai status get
naa.600508e00000000071e6339d7559b40d
VAAI Plugin Name:
ATS Status: unsupported
Clone Status: unsupported
Zero Status: supported
Delete Status: unsupported
[root@esxi6:~] esxcli storage core device partition list
Device Partition Start Sector End Sector Type Size
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- ------------ ---------- ---- -------------
t10.ATA_____WDC_WD1003FBYX2D50Y7B1________________________WD2DWCAW36KXSCNY 0 0 1953525168 0 1000204886016
t10.ATA_____WDC_WD1003FBYX2D50Y7B1________________________WD2DWCAW36KXSCNY 1 2048 1953523712 fb 1000203091968
mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0 0 0 61457664 0 31466323968
mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0 1 64 8192 0 4161536
mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0 5 8224 520192 6 262127616
mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0 6 520224 1032192 6 262127616
mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0 7 1032224 1257472 fc 115326976
mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0 8 1257504 1843200 6 299876352
mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0 9 1843200 7086080 fc 2684354560
t10.ATA_____Samsung_SSD_850_PRO_256GB_______________S1SUNSAG346333H_____ 0 0 500118192 0 256060514304
t10.ATA_____Samsung_SSD_850_PRO_256GB_______________S1SUNSAG346333H_____ 1 2048 419432448 fb 214748364800
naa.600508e00000000071e6339d7559b40d 0 0 623046656 0 318999887872
naa.600508e00000000071e6339d7559b40d 1 2048 623046623 fb 318998822400
My main VM store is currently on a single Samsung SSD, connected to the internal Intel controller. While performance is not stellar here either, it is able to reach above 100 MB/s writes which is much more acceptable.
What may be causing this constant HDD seek/thrashing while writing to the RAID 1 array, and is there a way to mitigate it in ESXi 6.0?
Should I try downgrading the firmware to P19 and also reverting the VMware drivers to P19?
Can I activate or deactivate some VMFS related features?
Can I from ESXi modify the drive cache behavior?
Am I s**t-out-of-luck with seeing any decent write performance using this controller, while retaining some semblance of data integrity in the event of power failure, for example?