Proliant DL380 G7

[marvhuffaker]

Have 2 proliant DL380 G7's with P410i Array controllers and SAS hard drives in RAID 5. Running VmWare ESX 4.1 Update 1. There is a 256MB RAID Cache module installed. I just found out that there is no battery attached to the RAID and that because of this, I believe the acceleration on the controller is disabled by default.

From the start, we've had severely degraded performance on the system. VMWare support has stated that the disk subsystem is taking way too long to respond to requests, and this leads me back to the controller. I'm accustomed to always having a battery as part of the controller, so this was not something I expected until I dug into it deep.

So I know I need a battery on the array. However, there is a setting on the P410i controller that allows you to enable acceleration despite a missing/drained battery. I have enabled this option as a test, but it has not helped performance one bit. Unfortunately this is the only setting and its either on or off. I don't see any other options such as read/write cache balance.

Do I need the battery before the array accelerator will perform at it's peak capacity? Are there other settings that could help?

Thanks in advance.

Marvin





Marvin Huffaker, MCNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.
A Novell Platinum Partner

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[ntinlin]

Hi Marvin,

I have a DL360 G7 with a dead cache battery at the moment and it is also saying accelerator is disabled.

With older SA's if the battery failed or wasn't there they would normally fall back to using 100% read-cache.
Mine is sitting at 25% read/75% write.

Perhaps if you were able to change to 100% read you might get somewhere. Or it could be that your IO across the disks is so random that a read-cache wouldn't help much anyway.

Neill

 

[marvhuffaker]

Neill, I know what you're saying, i just can't even find a setting that allows me to change the read/write balance. I just can't believe that HP would even ship a server without a battery on the array.. I should have a battery in the next couple days and hopefully that will resolve the issue.

Marvin Huffaker, MCNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.
A Novell Platinum Partner

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[JimInKS]

Do you have the Array Configuration Utility installed?
It is on the install disks that come with the server.

This is for a ML350 G6 with 410i controller.

Open the Utility
Select the controller, controller settings, and it is right there.

Array Accelerator (Cache) Ratio:
_ 0% Read / 100% Write
_ 25% Read / 75% Write
_ 50% Read / 50% Write
_ 75% Read / 25% Write
_ 100% Read / 0% Write

Transformation Priority:
_ High
_ Medium
_ Low

Rebuild Priority:
_ High
_ Medium
_ Low

Surface Scan Delay:
Valid Range: 0 (Disabled) - 30 seconds

 

[marvhuffaker]

Are you referring to the Windows utility? This is running on VMware so that's not an option.. But I did boot with a Smartstart CD and went into the Smartarray utility but did not see any configurable options. I'll look again. Thanks.

Marvin

 

[JimInKS]

oops, missed that. I thought everyone ran Windows

I did a little googling and did find this at:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1300895

Re: ESXi 3.5 U4 on HP DL380 G6 has slow disk performance

grantdavies:

We recently added the BBWC to a DL360 Gen 5 that was performing slowly in our data centre. I took the server down to physically install the battery. Then booted the server with Smart Start to ensure that the cache ratios were setup to the defaults (75% write and 25% read). They were there automatically. I then booted the server back up into VMWare ESXi 3.5.

Approx 24 hours later, i confirmed that speeds were approx 60-70MB/s...which was a huge improvement over previous speeds of 2-4MB/s.

Thus, I did nothing else other than shut down, plug in battery and turn back on. It's worth noting too that I had a P400i with 256MB of cache and I left the 256MB of cache, just added the BBWC and our problems are resolved.