I am evaluating various storage solutions for an ESXi 5 host and was surprised by the slow read performance with FreeNAS in the Intel NAS benchmarks.
"FileCopyFromNAS"
FreeNAS-CIFS share: 26.3 MB/s
QNAP-iscsi: 42.4 MB/s
QNAP-NFS: 55.8 MB/s
VMDK: 137.5 MB/s
"FileCopyToNAS"
FreeNAS-CIFS share: 21.2 MB/s
QNAP-iscsi: 23.7 MB/s
QNAP-NFS: 23.7 MB/s
VMDK: 7.4 MB/s
The configurations are:
FreeNAS, running as a VM with 8 GB ram, ZFS filesystem, benchmark run on a CIFS share, VM running the tests or on the same host connected through a virtual vSwitch, physical disk volume used is the same as for VMDK
QNAP TS-659 PRO, 4 WD-RE4 2 TB disks in RAID5 configuration connected via 1 GB network and HP1910 switch, mounted as iSCSI or NFS datastore on the host
VMDK, 2 WD-RE4 2 TB disks in RAID 0 configuration, connected through a Dell PERC H200 controller locally on the host, as this is the underlying disk used by FreeNAS it represents what should be achievable.
The host is a Dell T710 with 32 GB of ram and dual four core Xeon processors (2.4 GHz). The systems was running no other significant load at the time of the tests.
The write performance is in line with the QNAP and much better than the direct connected disk (the H200 controller lacks a cache and disables the disk cache which makes for slow writes).
What surprises me is the read performance which only reaches 20% of the underlying disk performance (VMDK). The other benchmarks in the Intel suite points to a bottleneck in the read performance at about 30 MB/s for FreeNAS which I find surprising given the hardware it is running on.
I have searched the forum for suggestions and tried some of the aux settings for CIFS with almost no effect. Anyone have any suggestions?
"FileCopyFromNAS"
FreeNAS-CIFS share: 26.3 MB/s
QNAP-iscsi: 42.4 MB/s
QNAP-NFS: 55.8 MB/s
VMDK: 137.5 MB/s
"FileCopyToNAS"
FreeNAS-CIFS share: 21.2 MB/s
QNAP-iscsi: 23.7 MB/s
QNAP-NFS: 23.7 MB/s
VMDK: 7.4 MB/s
The configurations are:
FreeNAS, running as a VM with 8 GB ram, ZFS filesystem, benchmark run on a CIFS share, VM running the tests or on the same host connected through a virtual vSwitch, physical disk volume used is the same as for VMDK
QNAP TS-659 PRO, 4 WD-RE4 2 TB disks in RAID5 configuration connected via 1 GB network and HP1910 switch, mounted as iSCSI or NFS datastore on the host
VMDK, 2 WD-RE4 2 TB disks in RAID 0 configuration, connected through a Dell PERC H200 controller locally on the host, as this is the underlying disk used by FreeNAS it represents what should be achievable.
The host is a Dell T710 with 32 GB of ram and dual four core Xeon processors (2.4 GHz). The systems was running no other significant load at the time of the tests.
The write performance is in line with the QNAP and much better than the direct connected disk (the H200 controller lacks a cache and disables the disk cache which makes for slow writes).
What surprises me is the read performance which only reaches 20% of the underlying disk performance (VMDK). The other benchmarks in the Intel suite points to a bottleneck in the read performance at about 30 MB/s for FreeNAS which I find surprising given the hardware it is running on.
I have searched the forum for suggestions and tried some of the aux settings for CIFS with almost no effect. Anyone have any suggestions?