So I've got and HP DL380p G8 with 2 E5-2640 processors and I believe 28G ram. I'm using both the HP P420i (HBA Mode) and an LSI SAS9200-8i that I added. The P420i has 8 10k 450G drives and the LSI has 4 500G WD RED SSDs. I added an Intel dual port 10G ethernet adapter.
The only purpose in life this has is to provide VMFS storage for my lab as a Network engineer. I have windows Domain Controllers, Cisco ISE, 9800 WLCs, DNAC, FTD/FMC and an assortment of other VMs. These VM's reside on a Cisco UCS 5108 blade chassis with 4 B200 M4 blades and 1 B420 M3 blade. The Chassis has the 6324 FI's.
All of this is connected together as the FI's have a 40G etherchannel (10x4) per FI across a set of Nexus 5596's with VPC.
The DL380p is connected with both of the SFP's across the 5596's as well. Internal to the chassis I'm using the vmware software iSCSI and on the TrueNAS i've got one IP tied to each of the SFP ports that I target and setup vmware for MPIO.
The drives on each controller are just one big volume each and show up as two datastores to the ESX hosts.
This has served me well for a 2-3 years now. I know using the P420i isn't good with Truenas but its worked along. Other than the I/O bottlenecks I see when deploying an OVA or some other high I/O operation things worked pretty well. Get to many VM's running things were a little sluggish.
All of this other than a few upgrades I've done was free to me. I added the LSI card and 10G nic. Yesterday, something happened and based on another post of mine I think the issue was with the SDCard I had installed TrueNAS on. I'm going to attempt to reinstall and restore my backup to a SATA drive connected directly to the SATA port of the DL380. I think this is an intel of some sort. I didn't have the cable for it so that is coming but it got me to thinking. I've not put anything into this and maybe there is a way with a little $ thrown at it to make it even better or... come to terms that its as good as its going to get and move on to look for something else.
So given the above in mind. Taking into account the purpose of VMFS/iSCSI can you think of any upgrades I could do to enhance this hardware and up the performance etc? The data isn't even an issue, its lab, it can go if needed. I have veeam backups of the critical stuff like the Domain Controllers and can simply rebuild whatever I need. Some thoughts I had:
Abandon the P420i and replace with something better suited for Freenas? Another LSI SAS9200? I'm not sure here? What gives the best performance.
SLOG? I don't know much about this but would like to hear your thoughts?
L2ARC? I'd have to get a pci NMVE card or something I think to entertain this? Make any sense?
RAM upgrade? 64/128GB?
Rebuild the drive configurations and use a bunch of mirrors instead?
Abandon it and just look for new/different hardware that would work better out the gate re-using the drives I have?
Just curious on the community's thoughts with performance in mind on i/o as it relates to VMFS use case and iSCSI what would you do?
The only purpose in life this has is to provide VMFS storage for my lab as a Network engineer. I have windows Domain Controllers, Cisco ISE, 9800 WLCs, DNAC, FTD/FMC and an assortment of other VMs. These VM's reside on a Cisco UCS 5108 blade chassis with 4 B200 M4 blades and 1 B420 M3 blade. The Chassis has the 6324 FI's.
All of this is connected together as the FI's have a 40G etherchannel (10x4) per FI across a set of Nexus 5596's with VPC.
The DL380p is connected with both of the SFP's across the 5596's as well. Internal to the chassis I'm using the vmware software iSCSI and on the TrueNAS i've got one IP tied to each of the SFP ports that I target and setup vmware for MPIO.
The drives on each controller are just one big volume each and show up as two datastores to the ESX hosts.
This has served me well for a 2-3 years now. I know using the P420i isn't good with Truenas but its worked along. Other than the I/O bottlenecks I see when deploying an OVA or some other high I/O operation things worked pretty well. Get to many VM's running things were a little sluggish.
All of this other than a few upgrades I've done was free to me. I added the LSI card and 10G nic. Yesterday, something happened and based on another post of mine I think the issue was with the SDCard I had installed TrueNAS on. I'm going to attempt to reinstall and restore my backup to a SATA drive connected directly to the SATA port of the DL380. I think this is an intel of some sort. I didn't have the cable for it so that is coming but it got me to thinking. I've not put anything into this and maybe there is a way with a little $ thrown at it to make it even better or... come to terms that its as good as its going to get and move on to look for something else.
So given the above in mind. Taking into account the purpose of VMFS/iSCSI can you think of any upgrades I could do to enhance this hardware and up the performance etc? The data isn't even an issue, its lab, it can go if needed. I have veeam backups of the critical stuff like the Domain Controllers and can simply rebuild whatever I need. Some thoughts I had:
Abandon the P420i and replace with something better suited for Freenas? Another LSI SAS9200? I'm not sure here? What gives the best performance.
SLOG? I don't know much about this but would like to hear your thoughts?
L2ARC? I'd have to get a pci NMVE card or something I think to entertain this? Make any sense?
RAM upgrade? 64/128GB?
Rebuild the drive configurations and use a bunch of mirrors instead?
Abandon it and just look for new/different hardware that would work better out the gate re-using the drives I have?
Just curious on the community's thoughts with performance in mind on i/o as it relates to VMFS use case and iSCSI what would you do?
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