Creating/Deleting Datastore - How fast should it be?

[mbx369]

Hi,

How long should it take to create a datastore? Or how can one tell that something is not quite right?

I have tested and tabulated the results, and only 1 ESX server is always the fastest. Whether it's creating or deleting a datastore from the same LUN, it will take an average of 3min.

The rest of the ESX servers will take anywhere between 14-18 min to create and 10-12min to delete.

Btw, this recently happened after upgrading to ESX 4.1 Upd 1.

I did a fresh installation on Hosts B3 & B4, but ONLY Host B3 gave the "3min" average.

Any fresh ideas are welcomed.

Here's the setup & test results:

ESX 4.1 Upd 1 b348481

SAN: EMC NS-480 (tried on NetApp as well. same result. so no problem with the SAN & SAN Ports)

LUN: 144GB FC

Datastore block size: 4 (didn't matter, tried with other block size on the slowest host & still the same results)

MPP: MRU

Storage Array Type; VMW_SATP_CX (default)

Cluster: A -> 2 hosts

Host A1: HP ProLiant DL380 G6 / HBA - QLogic 2432

Host A2: HP ProLiant DL380 G6 / HBA - QLogic 2432

Cluster: B -> 4 hosts

Host B1: DELL PE R900 / HBA - Emulex LPe11000

Host B2: DELL PE R900 / HBA - Emulex LPe11000

Host B3: DELL PE R910 / HBA - QLogic 2432

Host B4: DELL PE R910 / HBA - QLogic 2432

Cluster: C -> 2 hosts

Host C1: HP ProLiant DL580 G5 / HBA - QLogic 2432

Host C2: HP ProLiant DL580 G5 / HBA - QLogic 2432

[AndreTheGiant]

Seems you have some locking issue.

But strange that one host works fine.

All your hosts see the same LUNs?

How much LUNs, hosts and VMs do you have?

Andre

[mbx369]

Hi Andre,

As per the earlier post, there are 8 ESX hosts in 3 different clusters.

All of the hosts sees the same LUNs and there a total of 150++ VMs spread across the 8 hosts.

I have NetApp & EMC SAN as datastores.

This series of tests were done on the 144GB FC LUN on NS-480(EMC) for creating/deleting datastore. No VMs are on that LUN.

When you mentioned "locking issues", are you referring to the host locking on LUNs? I didn't see any "SCSI Reservation" sort of errors logged in the vmkernel. I did restart the mgmt-vmware services on all hosts and the vCenter svcs as well. But none seemed to have an effect on the problem.