Hi,
In november 2011 we purchased an 6100XV and recently an 6210X has been racked to be placed within the same group as the old unit. For testing purposes both units are running in their own group for now untill I'm happy with what I see.
The setup:
As storage we've a PS6100XV (4x 1Gbit + MGT) and an 6210X (2x 10Gbit (copper or fiber) + MGT) both running FW 7.07 and connected to our iSCSI switched.
Our storage network consist of two M6348's placed in our M1000E chassis. The switches are stacked and running version 5.1.3.7.
The processing power for our vSphere cluster is coming from our M1000E chassis with 4 blades (M710/M820). Each blade is running vSphere 5.5 (1892794) with MEM 1.2 installed and is connected with 4x 1 Gbit to the internal M6348 ports using 4 paths.
The 'problem':
When dd-ing 2 GB of data from /dev/zero to disk within the VM I see diffrent results. Please note that I'm using the same VMware host, network etc only diffrent equallogic's:
6100XV : 101 MB/s
6210X : 239 MB/s
Looking in esxtop I see the following on my iSCSI ports during the 2GB write:
6100XV:
Latency raises to 7 ms (seen by SanHQ as well)
We see and equally spread load across all 4 links of ~256 Mbit
Esxtop - network
PORT-ID USED-BY TEAM-PNIC DNAME PKTTX/s MbTX/s PKTRX/s MbRX/s %DRPTX %DRPRX
50331658 vmk2 vmnic4 vSwitch1 2182.96 256.54 3934.29 4.20 0.00 0.00
50331659 vmk3 vmnic5 vSwitch1 2249.15 265.84 4087.83 4.37 0.00 0.00
50331660 vmk4 vmnic8 vSwitch1 2182.39 269.51 4053.12 4.44 0.00 0.00
50331661 vmk5 vmnic9 vSwitch1 2155.30 267.10 4032.52 4.43 0.00 0.00
Esxtop - virtual disk
GID VMNAME VDEVNAME NVDISK CMDS/s READS/s WRITES/s MBREAD/s MBWRTN/s LAT/rd LAT/wr
7115 mail38 - 2 576.02 69.81 506.21 1.06 118.68 22.27 7.01
6210X:
Latency raises to 74 ms (seen by SanHQ as well)
We see and pretty close maxed out load across both links of 900+ Mbit
Esxtop - network
PORT-ID USED-BY TEAM-PNIC DNAME PKTTX/s MbTX/s PKTRX/s MbRX/s %DRPTX %DRPRX
50331658 vmk2 vmnic4 vSwitch1 10995.86 918.20 16286.85 14.44 0.00 0.00
50331659 vmk3 vmnic5 vSwitch1 11036.87 945.63 16856.19 11.83 0.00 0.00
50331660 vmk4 vmnic8 vSwitch1 247.96 8.55 251.77 3.59 0.00 0.00
50331661 vmk5 vmnic9 vSwitch1 258.45 8.35 251.77 4.51 0.00 0.00
Esxtop - virtual disk
GID VMNAME VDEVNAME NVDISK CMDS/s READS/s WRITES/s MBREAD/s MBWRTN/s LAT/rd LAT/wr
3477742 eql02bench01 - 1 436.24 2.15 434.09 0.01 216.48 11.68 74.16
As the 6210X only has two active ports it only utilises two paths but as you can see it can combined both links to a 2 Gbit connection where the 6100XV can not combined all four links to a 4 Gbit connection. Besides the bandwidth 'issue' I'm seeing a huge diffrene in latency during the writes between both units.
Questions:
1) What the diffrence between both units that causes the one to be limited to 1 Gbit and the other not
2) Why is the write latency so high? Both controllers are in the green so write back should be active.
Regards,
- Henk