Dell PowerEdge T110II wth PERC H700 and ESXi 5.5 slow VM performance.

[Odessaboy1]

Hello folks.  I am new to VMWare and looking for some help.

Here is my set up;

Dell T110ii - E3-1220, 16Gb RAM wtih lates BIOS and firmware.

PERC H700(latest firmware)  with 3 - 600GB SAS drives and 1 - 300GB SAS drive on the same channel.

So, 3-600GB drives are configures as RAID 5 with WB enabled.  300gb drive is a startup drive, on the same channel as 3 other drives and configured as a separate VD.

I use 300Gb drive to load ESXi.

When creating VM and using datastore on RAID5 partition WIN2012R2 performs very slow.

It took almost 2hrs to install, and after it was finally got installed, performance is very sluggish.

As a test, I also used H200 controller.  While installing OS on VM went fast, working with windows was unbearable.

Am I doing something wrong here?  How do I configure server for optimal performance?  Is PERC H700 having performance issues with ESXi?  What are my options?

Thanks

Felix

[jrmunday]

Hi Felix,

The PERC H700 is supported and works fine with ESXi. The first thing I would check is the BIOS settings to disable power saving features including C states, specifically C1E disabled. If there is a performance profile, make sure this is set to Maximum performance.

Can you also check the performance counters for the guest virtual machine to see what disk latency values are. Also install the VM tools.

Cheers,

Jon

[Odessaboy1]

Thank Jon.  I made changes you suggested and it did get better.  I created new VM and installed WIN2012 and it went much faster this time.  Here is a graph depicting performance

[Odessaboy1]

And here is the performance stats for the second VM

[Alistar]

Hi there,

do you have Write Back enabled in the PERC BIOS? If you do, check iDRAC or DELL OMSA whether it really is, there was a bug in pre .0009 firmware that when a battery has finished the learning cycle that the controller stayed in write-through mode although write-back was enabled. This seems like a performance that you would get in write-through mode.

[Odessaboy1]

Alistr, thanks for response.  This is new (to the system) (re-purposed) RAID controller.  It was installed last night, so it might still be learning.  I don't have iDRAC option on the server, but it is set in WB mode in PERC BIOS and I even checked "Use WB even without battery".  How can I check if I don't have iDRAC?  BIOS shows WB. mode.

Thanks

[Alistar]

Glad to shed some light on the issue. The thing what you need is an Open Manage Server Administrator. Depending on your vSphere search for your supported ESXi version and search on DELL pages - you can start here: Dell OpenManage Server Administrator vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB) for ESXi 5.1 Driver Details ... and refine your search further.

After this is set up and installed you can connect to the appliance by entering https://esxi_ip:1311 - it is a hardware monitoring agent with a web front-end

some more sources for you: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/extras/m/white_papers/20071085/download

https://communities.vmware.com/message/2310225

[jrmunday]

That latency looks awful, I'm not surprised performance is less than acceptable. Can you change the performance counters from "Disk" to "Virtual Disk" and show the read and write latency

[Odessaboy1]

Alistar,

after spending all day doing what you told me, i was able to complete it.  Apparently it shows battery in failed state, but still write back policy is enabled.  So, what does that mean?  Degraded performance because battery is not charged?  Thanks

[Odessaboy1]

Alistar, You were right, it is battery issue.

	2335	Fri Feb 27 01:58:00 2015	Storage Service	Controller event log: Battery has failed and cannot support data retention. Please replace the battery: Controller 0 (PERC H700 Integrated)
		2335	Fri Feb 27 01:58:00 2015	Storage Service	Controller event log: BBU disabled; changing WB virtual disks to WT, Forced WB VDs are not affected: Controller 0 (PERC H700 Integrated)

[Alistar]

Even though it says "Forced WB VDs are not affected" I think otherwise. Try checking if you indeed have the latest firmware for your controller installed DELL PERC H700 adpt v12.10.6-0001, A12 Driver Details | Dell US and also change your policy to "adaptive read ahead" - this might not do much but since ESXi workload with VMFS is all random, read ahead (best used with sequential reads) could impact the performance a bit.