Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller Cards

[jrmunday]

Hi All,

Does anyone have experience and best practice recommendations for configuring a PERC H700 controller in an ESXi host?

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/perc-technical-guidebook.pdf

I am interested in the advanced settings (this is what I am using at the moment);

I have two requirements;

1. Use SSD's as local storage to align disks - fast crunching, with redundancy
2. ESXi host swap cache

For the first option, I am going to migrate VM's onto the local datastore, align the partitions using vOptimizer Pro and then move them back to NFS / SAN storage.

Once I have finished aligning disk, I am going to re-configure the SSD's for host cache.

Any pointers appreciated.

Thanks,

Jon

[jrmunday]

For anyone interested, these are the results for a single worker thread with the above PERC configuration;

[admin]

The only recommendation is to set the RAID mode to Write backup with battery backup enabled and not use write through.

[JarryG]

That might be true for "classic" drives, but I think it becomes less important with SSD (which OP is going to use), because SSDs come with much large own cache. Typically HDD cache size is somewhere between 16MB and 128MB, while common cache size for SSD is 512MB - 2GB. There is no need to cache the same data twice (in raid-controller cache, and in ssd-cache)...