Hi All,
We are having hardware issues with our MSA G3 P2000's, so have deployed an EMC CX3-40f to offload some of our VMs onto. The EMC has been donated to us from another part of our company, so comes with no support or Powerpath Licences.
I'm running into a few performance issues, and am hoping someone can help me.
Our setup
C7000 G7 460C blades -> Q2462 HBA - > Brocade 8Gb switches (HP4/24) -> EMC CX3-40f FLARE 26 and MSA P2000
Installed OS : ESXi 5.1 914609
Test LUN CX3 - non meta-LUN with 15K FC x 12 R10
Test LUN P2000 - 10K SAS 10K x 4 R10
Test VM - 4 vCPU, test disk on separate Paravirtual controller
Test Datastore - VMFS 5, 1Mb block size
Brocade Zoning setup - Individual zones, 1 initiator and 1 target (host + SAN HBA)
Multipathing : FIXED with SATP_CX
**Troubleshooting steps**
Tested 64, 128, 256 element size - same.
Disabled read/write cache - same.
Disabled prefetch - same
Reduced Qlogic throttle execution from ~65000 to 256
Updated HBA FW through HP update ISO
Updated qla driver through VMWare Update Manager
Installed Windows physical server - same results as ESXi server
I'm using HD Tune Pro to obtain some IOPs and bandwidth results
****CX3****
512 bytes - 80 IOPS - 0.1Mb/s
4KB - 272 IOPS - 1Mb/s
64KB - 221 IOPS - 11Mb/s
1MB - 100 IOPs - 83Mb/s
Random - 138 IOPS - 62MB/s
avg access time 4-5ms
****MSA P2000****
512 bytes - 1500 IOPS - 0.7Mb/s
4KB - 1057 IOPS - 4MB/s
64KB - 887 IOPS - 55MB/s
1MB - 409 IOPS - 409MB/s
Random - 610 IOPS - 309MB/s
As you can see our MSA P2000 is performing much better than the CX3 with 4 disks as opposed to 12 in the MSA!
Is anyone else using the CX3 with 5.1 with success, or am I putting too much faith into this old unit?