HP 3PAR 8200 - Configuration

[Alastairb25]

Hi,

 

We recently purchased a HP 3PAR 8200 SAN with 16 * K2P91A - 3.84tb drives

 

Initially configured as RAID6

4 * 10gbps connected to Cisco 6506

2 * Hosts - Dell R630 with 2 * 10gbps connected to Cisco 6506 for SAN

Jumbo frames enabled

 

The performance is not quite what I was expecting

Previously I have used Crystal Disk Mark

 

Is Crystal a fair test of SAN?

Unsure if Cisco side the links should be Aggregated via Port Channel?

 

 

Raid6 is obviously more fault tolerant and slower than some other examples

 

Thanks

[PotNoodleTech]

Welcome to SANS, where you spend 10-20k and get worse performance than a bunch of drives in raid 5 or 6 in a Poweredge 740xd.

[Aprice]

Welcome to SANS, where you spend 10-20k and get worse performance than a bunch of drives in raid 5 or 6 in a Poweredge 740xd.

 

I do like the 3Pars, but wouldn't really be looking to install SANs in any of our customers now. S2D or VSAN would be our go to.

[Davit2005]

You might not get anything more than redundancy if you aggregate the ports.

 

Assuming you are using iSCSI for connections?

 

Are you using the onboard/daughterboard 10Gb connections on the Dells?

 

Are you using a Hypervisor if so which?

Edited August 13, 2024 by Davit2005

[Alastairb25]

Using iSCSI

SFP modules direct into chassis, no daughter card

HyperV

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Already use StorageSpaces but 4k video and alike meant capacity has become an issue.

Also when it falls back to the HDD tier as it fills the speed collapses

[Davit2005]

4k over a 10Gb link even to SSD is difficult enough with a few clients.

 

So basically you have networked clients accessing/working with 4k video that is attached to a server via iSCSI. And I take it that server where the storage is shared from is a VM too?

[Alastairb25]

The issue is more speed testing it is slow compared to StorageSpaces, even though SAN is All SSD

Re tested using ATTO from VMs

 

2 * Hyper V Hosts - Dell R630

1 * RAID1 - OS

4 * Intel SSD and 4 * HDD - StorageSpaces on each

 

Worked well however the 4k video requirement has meant space issues

StorageSpaces retained but SAN for more storage requirements greater than hosts have and HDD tier is slow

SAN also gives snapshots and use of cluster

 

Setup with ReFS however seems this is incorrect so as its not live going back to NTFS

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/failover-cluster-csvs

Edited August 13, 2024 by Alastairb25

[PotNoodleTech]

Keep working on it you may find the culprit but I went through all this when I used to run Dell EMC (and other make) SANs and could never get them to perform well no matter what I tried.

 

This is what one of my VM sees here, 8 x SSD local storage on Hyper V this VM only has 4GB ram and 2 vCPUs no storage spaces or anything at the moment as we are in between servers and in between school mergers so no point spending more for now. Literally this setup cost peanuts, refurbished/used server with refurbished/used enterprise SSDs wrapped up in a simple case of Raid5.

 

 

I've only run Dell Poweredges with local storage on a decent raid card with battery backup cache for the last 10+ years and performance and reliability has been far superior to the SANS I've tried over the years.

Edited August 14, 2024 by PotNoodleTech

[Alastairb25]

Interesting, the major difference seems to be i get poor write speed.

 

Which almost sounds like a setting on the SAN

 

New results with SAN volume now reformatted to NTFS

[Alastairb25]

Latest results

Move to NTFS, default cluster and MTU change has helped

 

[PotNoodleTech]

Looking better. I am using Raid 5 as it's SSD only, so i want to minimise unnecessary parity writes to prolong write endurance - Raid 6 will have a LOT more writes going on and so should be slower write speed anyway.

[Alastairb25]

I originally wanted to go with RAID60 but did not seem to be an option.

 

Potentially RAID5 nowadays is not enough?

 

Also some interesting network config to look into.

 

A ping with -l 9000 fails.. so looking at Config on Cisco side

[3s-gtech]

RAID5 on HDDs will give you thoroughly mediocre write performance. I wouldn’t touch it.

 

1, 10, 50, 60 - depends what your SAN can do.

[Alastairb25]

Cisco 6506 SIDE

mtu 9216

 

Server on Intel Ethernet 10G 4P X520/l350 rNDC

Jumbo set 9014

 

Options are 4088, 9014 or Disabled

 

Ping -l 9000 x.x.x.x to SAN Ip Request time out

 

It works up to -l 8950 ok