I just had an issue with an HP DL380 G5 local storage Smart Array P400 (not P400i) SCSI controller: ESX versions 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.2 Update 1. The VMFS was extremely slow (1000Kbps transfer rate on a Gigabit Ethernet connection, for example). When I copied to file systems other than VMFS, it was fast. Turns out it was the Smart Array controller. My customer happened to also purchase the Smart Array P800 controller (supported by 3.0.2 and an auxilliary driver CD for 3.0.1). So, I pulled the P400 out of the system and connected the drive array to the P800 controller. Works like a charm now. Other people have posted they had success with a Battery-Backed Write-Cache Module (BBWC) from HP, but I didn't get the chance to try that. I fortunately had the P800's to work with.
At first I thought the issue was with the network because the customers were VLAN'ing from one server room to another. Then I thought it was the Service Console specifically, because migrating VM's was taking hours and hours and with VEEAM FastSCP, I could actually see the transfer rate when copying files from /vmfs/volumes/storage. But when I copied to /root from one machine to another, it was blazing fast. And my VM's were very fast in their copy jobs of large files. I had 2 servers with P400i controllers that had no problems and 2 servers with P400 controllers that had the serious problem. There's got to be some issue with the P400 controllers and VMFS. Read performance was great, write performance was awful. Glad we had the P800 controllers on hand!
-Hans Doerr
