Paul

In “Enhancements” thew write: “… Increased per I/O max transfer size from 512K to 1M.” which might have a positive impact on performance.
Were you able and willing to give it a shot, Lukas?

Thank you very much,
Paul

thanks for your hint, but surely it’s enabled (128 MB, 50% read/50%write).
Besides caching improves reading and especially “writing” of small files but not 3GB-Files.

Paul

Is the cache enabled on the e200. I believe it is disbled by default. if you download the array configuration utility (ACU) fro the HP site you can enable it through the gui interface.

Let me know if it improves. I have a vsphere setup with a 64mb cache. I swapped the disks out installed windows 2008 so i could enable the cache. I am getting about 4mb/s. I can’t figure out why its so slow. I have ordered a 128mb BBW Kit from canada so i can enable raid 5 byuy another couple of disks and see if that helps any.

It has two 160GB HP Disks (WD RE2, i believe), and two WD1001FALS.

Here are the benchmarks:

160GB Disks: http://projectdream.org/~lb/HPE200RAID1WD160GB.png
WD1001FALS: http://projectdream.org/~lb/HPe200RAID1WD1001FALS.png

@Paul
I actually have a ML115 G5, which has RAID-0, 1, 5 and 10 on the onboard nVidia controller, but I cannot use it with ESXi. I am using Hyper-V 2.0 at the moment, until I get a suitable hardware RAID controller.

@Lukas
Do you know if the performance is bad with RAID-1? I am thinking of forgetting about RAID-5, and sticking with RAID-1. The 2-port 3ware 9650SE-2LP looks good, but it is still a lot more expensive than an E200 (but I can see why they are so cheap now).

Jason,

Look at the benchmarks above. I have 4 WD1001FALS in RAID10 (the RAID Level which should give you the most performance, aside from RAID0). And the result is SLOWER than a SINGLE WD1001FALS! This should be very telling on how bad this thing is.

RAID5 performance will probably be a A LOT WORSE than RAID10. There are plenty of other RAID controllers for similar prices. 3ware for examples has good controllers that work with Whitebox ESXi machines. Check the Whitebox HCL.

You’ve got bad luck /w E200i.
Have you tried the internal (onboard) SATA RAID? This gives no RAID5 but probably better performance.

HTH, Paul

*
find my comment:
Paul:

Lukas,
you don’t work for HP, do you?
The performance of the e200i controller is on subground level. There is not much about the SATA drives attached to it. Each of them allone has a much better performance.

My 4GB Win2k3 server (4×750GB RAID5 + Spare) has 4x “Samsung Spinpoint F1 , 3.5?, 750 GB 7200rpm , 8.9ms , 32MB cache”. To copy a 3GB file on the RAID 5 takes full 6 minutes!!!
My laptop uses a ST9250421ASG (Seagate Momentus, 2.5?, 250 GB 7200rpm, 16MB cache) drive. Copying the same file locally takes 3:30 minutes. On a power optimized laptop drive!

Now tell me again about the SATA drives attached to the e200i…

to 850cc:
unlike workstation esxi always reserves the full disk space you assign. That might be 100GB and so it takes ages to “prepare” the virtual disks. Only solution is to exchange the e200i to sth. better.

Does anybody know what the maximum number of drives the E200 can use for RAID-5? Will the performance with 3 SATA drives really be worse than a single drive?

I currently use my ML110 to test out DPM 2010 with WS08R2. Luckily, there’s also a new driver for WS08R2:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=uk&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=3577708&prodNameId=3577715&swEnvOID=4064&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-08615b21190547299c5bc68449

I’ve installed it. The machine still boots, and here’s the result:

http://projectdream.org/~lb/new_driver.png

They claim these improvements:
“Added support for handling logical drive failure more gracefully. This improves the system responsiveness after logical drive failure.
Increased per I/O max transfer size from 512K to 1M.”
And these fixes:
“Improved I/O distribution in greater than 4 logical drive configurations.”

Do you think you could give it a try, Lucas? I have no spare (non-productive) ML110G5.

Thanks, Paul

Good point re: drivers in BartPE – I should have thought of that. :)

I’ll leave a link to my findings once complete. Will be interesting to see how the e200 will stack up, performance wise, against the onboard SATA controller.

Cheers,

Simon

BartPE is based on Windows XP or Server 2003. Neither of them ship with an E200 driver in-box, so you’d have to add that manually during the build stage.

Benchmarks would be interesting. Paul (Comment #1 on this post) has the same issue, and i believe he is using ESX/ESXi as well.

Regards,

Lukas

It is so annoying HP don’t allow the HP Firmware Maintenance CD to work with the HP Proliant 100 series of servers. I created a BartPE CD though when running the Online ROM flasher from this it said it couldn’t detect an e200 controller. Am putting on a temporary install of W2K8 onto the server to get around this limitation. Was going to get disk stats from it using iometer once built up as a local VMare vmfs store if interested?

Thanks,

Simon