Storage Array AX150i - Performance

[pjbarnes]

Good Morning,

I would be grateful for any reviews of the AX150i SCSI San. In particular:

i) How Many VMs are you running on it?

ii) Performance Issues encountered?

iii) Best practive on how to configure the RAID (raid 10/raid 5).

iiii) Is the performance affected by running vms on the first 3 FLARE drives.

We have a restricted budget and require a SAN in the region of £10k-£12k. The AX150 sits in this price bracket but I have concerns whether it can cope with our proposed setup of 4 ESX Hosts (VMware Infrastructure 3), and a total of 21 vms:

2x Domain Controller (350 Domain Users)

1x Exchange (20gb Mailbox Data)

2x Files Servers (600gb Data).

3x Print Servers

10x Terminal Servers. (80 Users)

1x Proxy Server

2x Application Servers

Thanks in advance,

[acr]

Its not the greatest SAN ive ever seen, but then again its targetted at entry..

Of the one's ive seen it seems to strugle as it scales toward the 20 VM mark, but as with everything here its always down to what the Apps are doing..

But with a limited budget your unfortunately not going to get Enterprise Storage.

[femialpha]

I have about 20 low i/o vm's using both raid5 and raid10. Even though i still have plenty of storage space left, i have deliberately pushed back on adding more vm's before i start to have problems. I also use the flare drives without issue but they key is i don't do any high i/o.

The best way to know is to look at current i/o characteristics of your present servers using perfmon or basic monitoring tools. Having said that, i would be unconfortable running the kind of servers you just mentioned on an AX150. Talk to your vendor as they might be able to give you a good deal with the CX3-10c or better still, look at the Equallogic PS100E. I just ordered Equallogic to replace the AX150 as i am increasing vm's to about 60!

[rbergin]

Quick one - why leave EMC for EQ - is it less expensive? I would have thought you would have upgraded the AX150 into a 300E but I am unfamiliar with the Equalogic product offerings.

I have two CX boxes - DR partners - a CX700 and a CX340 and I was going to put an ISCSI gateway and a shelf of SATA drives in it but i think the dual-SP AX150 is cheaper and I can migrate VM's to the bigger SAN's later on.

Thanks,

Rob

[femialpha]

If you are already an EMC shop, it is probably wise to stick with it and leverage your existing infrastructure. I am starting my SAN infrastructure from scratch. EMC actually turned out cheaper from Dell but we are avoiding the complexity of EMC by paying a little more.

We have 2 PS 300's for sql development but are configured using RAID5 so i'm starting another pool using SAS drives for vm's that are a bit i/o sensitive.

[rbergin]

What's in your AX150 now? FC or SATA?

Is the shift to SAS part of the increased number of VM's is the switch from SATA to SAS??

I figure trying to use the CX for VMWare would be slick but we run three big line of business applications there and I wanted to keep the VM's separate from them for now.

I am looking into the CX300i as well as the CX3-10c from EMC to see what is most cost effective.

$29k for 6 TB (RAW) and $24k 3 TB (RAW) from Dell and I would assume a VAR quote might be a little less expensive.

I have not priced the HP offering yet - the 1510 with a MSA20 or MSA30.

Thanks,

Rob

[femialpha]

The AX150i only uses SATA drives. The shift to SAS is because of vm density and my developers are very sensitive to performance issues. If the current PS300's were setup with raid10 or raid50, i would have just added another PS300/100 and take advantage of the extra spindles but they want it seperated. I hear the CX300i is available for cheap as but it is going EOL soon thats why i suggested the CX3-10c.

The reviews on this forum on the MSA 1000/1500 series has not been encouraging though.

[rbergin]

Thanks for the feedback. I am going to try and get a 6-7 TB (RAW) solution for $20-25k - I will price Equalogic and EMC and then pick one (leaning towards the AX150i) only because alot of the hosts I am going to convert are basically PC's working in a 1U form factor.

If I can replace 20 physical boxes with 2 DL380's and a AX150i, then I can migrate them over to FC SAN later on (the beauty of a virtual disk file).

I was unaware the CX300i was end of life but who knows maybe I can get it cheap enough.

I was trying to compare the ISCSI front-end for the CX700 and a shelf of SATA disk but i think its going to be more than $25k once I put in HBA's and Powerpath licensing but I will get it quotes so I can compare apples to orangatuans.

I know that using my existing SAN eliminates the need for the AX150's storage processors and the support/service plans - which is about $15-20k of the price - the disks are way cheap.

I just am not sure if a 500 GB SATA disks is the same price in a AX150 compared to a CX700 when you factor in the expensive real estate that shelf takes up.

Thanks,

Rob

[pjbarnes]

Thanks for your response,

I am just trawling through the IO logs at the moment and by removing the File Servers and possibly Exchange the AX150 looks like it might just cope.

Across hourly segments the average IOPS is around 100, the max being 420. (this is the toal operations per sec, we don't have a read and write breakdown yet).

Have you managed to retireve any statistics on IO performance from your AX150, I would be interested to hear what read and write iops your raid configurations are achieving.

[SyverDude]

In General, SATA backend disk drives will not perform very well in a mixed io load. we tipically can not get more than 140 IOPS on a LH SATA Array.

\- Jon

[femialpha]

I'm assuming you are talking about lefthand. Which model are you using?

[SyverDude]

Yes, I am specifically refering to the Lefthand NSM 160, their entry level. We saw this dismal performance level when we did iometer testing from a guest that was accessing the storage array through the software initiator.

\- Jon

[femialpha]

Well you have just 4 drives and the single controller is not particularly robust. You will need extra spindles to get anything worthwhile out of it.

[femialpha · Accepted solution]

I took a sampling and never had more than 400 iops. I did not bother breaking out read/write as the vm's were non-critical. According to EMC they recommend not running more than 400 light to medium exchange users. That should give you an idea of how low its optimal level is.

[pjbarnes]

femialpha: Thanks for the information on the AX150i its much appreciated.