esxi 5.1 Thin Disk

kspare · Tue Sep 10, 2013 5:12 pm

I have a test server setup running thin disks, we're finding everything to be really slow, compared to when we ran thick disks? by slow I mean 90% slower. we can't find a reason why?

Tue Sep 10, 2013 9:34 pm

dynamic disks are always slower then static

stick with array thin-provisioning and deduplication instead of a hypervisor one

kspare · Wed Sep 11, 2013 3:23 am

We found deduplication to be *really* slow, worse than a thin disk. The beta with vaai enabled made quite a difference too.

We're migrating all our data off our test box so we can rebuild the storage with full v8 support and 2012 so we can make a disk larger than 16tb.

I'll test out deduplication with eager disks and get back to you.

Wed Sep 11, 2013 7:01 am

V8-based one should actually accelerate I/O rather then steal it from the system. Do you happen to have any performance numbers?

kspare wrote:We found deduplication to be *really* slow, worse than a thin disk. The beta with vaai enabled made quite a difference too.

We're migrating all our data off our test box so we can rebuild the storage with full v8 support and 2012 so we can make a disk larger than 16tb.

I'll test out deduplication with eager disks and get back to you.

kspare · Wed Sep 11, 2013 5:14 pm

I haven't done deduplication on v8 yet. I'm migrating my data off so I can rebuild the machine with windows 2012. and creating a file larger than 16tb.

Thu Sep 12, 2013 9:43 am

OK, thank you for the heads up.
We`ll look forward to get an update from you.

kspare · Thu Sep 12, 2013 7:57 pm

It will be awhile, my disks moved very fast onto my starwind san as a thindisk, but once the disk was completly moved on the performance dropped by 90% so i'm basically crippled and have about 10tb of data to move off..very slowly. Even with the beta and vaai it's very slow.

Lesson learned I guess.

Fri Sep 13, 2013 6:09 pm

Stick with the FLAT containers in this case (no LSFS for now) and let techies run remote session to see what's wrong. Why performance was OK and then dropped 90% which is obviously not something we see all the time.

kspare wrote:It will be awhile, my disks moved very fast onto my starwind san as a thindisk, but once the disk was completly moved on the performance dropped by 90% so i'm basically crippled and have about 10tb of data to move off..very slowly. Even with the beta and vaai it's very slow.

Lesson learned I guess.

kspare · Fri Sep 13, 2013 9:28 pm

I got all the data off, i'm rebuilding the server with windows 2012 this time.

I'll test out the new file system and dedup and see what it's like.

Sat Sep 14, 2013 2:15 pm

Excellent! Please keep us updated about your progress. Much appreciated.

kspare wrote:I got all the data off, i'm rebuilding the server with windows 2012 this time.

I'll test out the new file system and dedup and see what it's like.