Dell T20 Server

[NewBoy]

Hi Everyone,

 

Just after anyones experience or suggestions really,

 

Our company recently purchased about 10 of these servers from Dell with the following spec,

 

 

1. 16GB RAM
   
2. 2*1TB Drives (for the OS H\W Mirrored)
   
3. 2*2TB Drives (for the Data H\W Mirrored)
   
4. Intel Xeon CPU E3-1225 v3 3.20Ghz
   
5. Running Server 2012 R2
   

 

They have replaced servers that were nearly 9 years old on different sites, yet since they have been in some staff are saying that the sysytem is now slower after the new server has gone in compared to the older one.

 

Are these servers not very good or is there any adjustments I can make to improve things ?? the networks are only 100MB but they were before as well.

[DJ-1701]

Do you have the original (outgoing) server specs?

Also, what type of hard drives? SAS? NearLine SAS? SATA Enterprise? SATA? What speed?

[NB9457]

What I've noticed in primary schools, is servers being replacing with setups like yours, 7200rpm drives, mirrored as compared to old servers with 10/15k Drives in a striped RAID array.

 

Could that be your issue?

[NewBoy]

The drives are standard SATA 7200 rpm, I dont have the old servers at hand as they are on site awaiting decommissioning.

[DJ-1701]

It could well be that the older servers have faster drives on them then. That's the only thing that I could think of being a bottleneck in that situation.

[NB9457]

The drives are standard SATA 7200 rpm, I dont have the old servers at hand as they are on site awaiting decommissioning.

 

Sounds like your problem is down to slow drives. Best practice in my opinion would be to use something like RAID10 on drives like that as it does make a big difference, but it is obviously at his point easier said than done unless the drives are hot-swappable.

[Boredguy]

Other thing to check is your network stats on the server. It's possible that the amount of network requests is the bottleneck depending on the size of the files, but as @DJ-1701 said, the slower drives in mirror will also be a bit slower than 10K drives in Raid 5.

[NewBoy]

Cheers guys it's given me a few things to look at anyway.

[Sagima]

My thought was that perhaps there is no cache on the raid controller or it's not enabled/being used.

[dry]

I agree with @NB9457, if the 9-year old servers were high spec, there's every chance they had 10k SAS drives compared to the new 7.2k SATA drives.

 

Also, how have you commissioned these servers? Installed Server2012 from scratch? Transferred VMs across?

[NewBoy]

Yes everything was installed from scratch and there are no VM's to carry across as the servers were for small schools, I am just looking into the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Application and have noticed that apparently if I disable 'write-cache buffer flushing' then system performance should improve.

[sted]

check the network card properties and disable virtual command queues esp if they are running vms this being on will turn the network card into sludge speed mode

[NewBoy]

As the network is 10\100 would it benefit to change the network card to 100MB Full Duplex.

[computer_expert]

As the network is 10\100 would it benefit to change the network card to 100MB Full Duplex.

 

The T20s have Gigabit ethernet depsite what the (sometimes incorrect) spec sheet says

Edited September 8, 2016 by computer_expert

[NewBoy]

Yeh I realise the server is Gigabit but the switches etc are 100MB would performance be better by slowing the server NIC down to 100MB Full Duplex ??

[DJ-1701]

Changing that from the standard wouldn't make a difference, as it would just drop down to the fastest speed the connection supports.

[3s-gtech]

No, you'd be better getting your core up to gigabit! You won't benefit from manually setting them.

 

I suspect your actual issue is that in your usage scenario, your new servers are not as quick as your old ones. Disks are the main question mark here, though the configuration may play a part. Two 7200rpm SATA disks in RAID 1 will struggle to compete with an array of 15k SCSI or SAS disks, despite the updates in tech.

[SHimmer45]

The NIC is going to auto sense so shouldnt need tweaking.

 

a couple of 7200RPM disk are not going to compete with an 15k SCSI array unless there are alot more of the 7200's which you dont have

[pantscat]

a couple of 7200RPM disk are not going to compete with an 15k SCSI array unless there are alot more of the 7200's which you dont have

 

This x a billion. (maybe exaggerating slightly).

 

But, yes, 7200rpm drives wont compete with "proper" fast SAS or SCSI drives unless you have a lot of them.

 

I would suggest swapping these drives out for faster 15k drives, or getting a lot more 7200RPM drives (but you might be limited as to how many you physically put in your server) and configure them as a RAID 5+1 array to get the most performance.

[3s-gtech]

Or stick large SSDs in there, but prepare yourself for the cost!

[SHimmer45]

for your "flat" file storage the 7200 drives should be up to it to a point, for Virtual machines no SSD or faster SAS Drives are going to be your options