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Bernie
Asked: 2013-08-23 09:35:08 +0800 CST

Slow throughput speeds with fusionio iodrive2

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I recently purchased two HP 380P Gen 8 servers with 365GB IODrive2s for VDI using Vmware View 5.2.

After using the latest HP vmware 5.1 update 1 ESX installer and then installing the Fusion-io drivers for ESX I was able to format the drive as VMFS5, create a pool and put the replica on the Fusion-io.

All of these seemed to run about as fast as our two 15k SAS drives in RAID0. Unsatisfied with the VDI experience we decide to create a pool with all components on the Fusion-io. The speed still didn't seem on par with what the spec sheets state. I finally did a test copy of from the Fusion-io to itself (from the ESXi ssh shell) and I am currently getting about 1GB per minute transfer rate. The white papers claim I should be getting around 500MBps.

Here are some tests:

# ls -lrt
rw-------    1 root     root     3572297728 Aug 22 11:43 VMware-VIMSetup-all-5.1.0-947939.iso
# du -h
3.3G    .

from 4 drive RAID10 15k SAS to itself:
cp VMware-VIMSetup-all-5.1.0-947939.iso test.iso takes 37s

from 4 drive RAID10 15k SAS to Fusion-io:
cp VMware-VIMSetup-all-5.1.0-947939.iso /vmfs/volumes/fusion2/test.iso takes 34 sec

from Fusion-io to itself:
cp test.iso test2.iso takes 78 sec

from my desktop SSD to itself: 32s

7200rpm hard drive to itself: 115s

I currently have a ticket open with HP and VMware but I am essentially getting fingerprinting. I am hoping someone in the community has solved my issues.

Outputs from IOMeter using 8 workers with the all in one access spec for 1 hour:

Samsung810 SSD
IOPS        Read IOps       Write IOps      MBps            Read MBps       Write MBps  Transactions per Second
3385.116269 1692.255704 1692.860565 43.364704   21.683055   21.681649   3385.116269

Fusion-io:
IOPS        Read IOps       Write IOps      MBps            Read MBps       Write MBps  Transactions per Second
13172.96404 6570.691766     6602.272278     168.838142      84.220818       84.617323   13172.96404

4disk15kSAS:
IOPS        Read IOps       Write IOps      MBps            Read MBps       Write MBps  Transactions per Second
62854.07353 31429.66595 31424.40759 805.541003  402.802938  402.738065  62854.07353
vmware-esxi

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Everything is working now. Thanks for all of you help. I wasn't testing the card vs the sas array hard enough. Once I used random writes and reads in testing and saturated the cache on the raid controller, the fusionio beat the array. 168MB/s vs 6 MB/s. I was also able to speed everything up in VDI by enabling a portion of the fusion to be used as host cache.

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