[ale] SATA, iSCSI, and ESX

[Jeff Lightner]

FYI:  The EMC Clariion CX3-20c is both Fibre and iSCSI capable and will
allow you to use either fibre or ATA drives (check on the latter - we're
using fibre but all the other Clariions give you a choice).

We use ATA in most of our Clariion arrays (CX700s) and using RAID10 get
very good performance.  However, for critical Production we still use
fibre drives in the one off solutions (data warehouse, mobile) on CX3-20
or CX3-20c and EMC DMX3 for the large Production database (4 TB).   On
the CX700s we have multiple 4 TB copies of the Production database for
various training/test/development purposes and aren't seeing any I/O
issues.

As noted by earlier poster critical factor for large databases is number
of spindles because IOPS is the main consideration for OLTP databases.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
deritchie at earthlink.net
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 9:13 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] SATA, iSCSI, and ESX

If you are running iSCSI, it is strongly recommended that you turn on
jumbo frames on a dedicated Gbit interface on the server. Also, it is a
good idea to lock the interface speed to 1 Gbit on the server to prevent
autonegotation problems.

Best regards,
Dave Ritchie
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

-----Original Message-----
From: "Ashley Wilson" <awilson at smartfurniture.com>

Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:07:32 
To:"'Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts'" <ale at ale.org>
Subject: [ale] SATA, iSCSI, and ESX


Forgive me if this is an absolutely stupid question... but is it
possible to
get decent performance out of an iSCSI SAN full of SATA disks backing an
ESX
server?  Has SATA advanced enough that it could be a reasonable (if
somewhat
lesser-performing) alternative to SAS or SCSI disks in an iSCSI SAN?
The
VMs are dev only, but the SAN would have a built-in NAS feature hosting
users' home folders.  Am I trying to do too much with too little?
Thanks,
-Ash 


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