IP35-Pro
Q6600
8GB DDR2 800
system on 300gb velociraptor
P400 v5.26 w/ 8x 15kRPM 72GB SAS drives in RAID 1+0. 256MB BBWC @ 75/25

I feel like I should be getting better read rates off this thing. I’m getting around 130-150MB/s for sequential read and 280MB/s for sequential write. This is on a guest using CrystalDiskMark

Any way to get better performance out of these 8x 15k SAS drives?

Also, a sort of weird problem I am having is with the controller not reporting proper port numbers or info for disks. In ACUCLI if I look at physicaldrives it shows a single drive reported as port 0:0 and repeats it 8 times. Same serial, status, everything.

Once I got the ACU on the SMH running (thanks Bjorn!) I could see them all identified by SCSI ID (but still not port).

This is on ESX 4.1

http://forum.lettronics.com/forums/thread/1273.aspx

system has been working smoothly. I think my poor fileserver performance might have been while the battery was still uncharged. I have been getting about 40-50 MB/sec read and write to the above 4 drives in RAID5 all the way to my workstation. I recently added 4 seagate 7200.12 1TB drives and in my first test I was able to see double that (!!) on a 4TB ISO

I still have to look at enableing SATA on drive cache, but as I no longer have my drive with 2003 server and the CLI installed, I would have to redo that.

BIOS 6.86 and 7.08 are no good on my system!!!
If I use them, then my array card hangs during boot, just after all the drives are initialized. I had to downgrade back to 5.26 and that meant doing so in a real HP server and the firmware cd on USB key

ESXI 4 update 1 are working wonderfully off my USB stick

I was able to boot on my gigabyte x58 with the p400 , they fixed it with a bios update. I can’t recall exactly what version fixed it but thats all it took.

just install

( rpm -ivh )

cpqacuxe-8.10-1.noarch.rpm
hpacucli-8.10-2.noarch.rpm
hpsmh-2.1.8-177.linux.i386.rpm

and start the acu web interface

cpqacuxe -R

now open the esx firewall ports

esxcfg-allowincoming
esxcfg-allowoutgoing

and browse to the ip of the esx box on port

2301

Here you can see the status of the drives and change the array settings …

I am using hpacucli, cli interface with a script emailing me the array status with sendemail.

No, I haven’t found a way yet to get raid status or warnings.

I’m running RAID 5 with 4x 500GB SATA disks.

ESXi 4 works perfectly on the system.

Mainboard: EVGA 780i SLI
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
NIC: 2 integrated Nvidia plus a dual Intel PRO/1000
RAM: 4×2048 Mushkin PC6400 (total 8GB)
RAID controller: HP P400 with 512 cache with Battery
HD’s: 4x 500GB SATA Seagate ES.2
BootDrive: USB-Key

Have you found a way to get HDD LED lights working? in an HP server, you will get one for power, access, and failure. Right now I have none.

Have you found a way to get raid status or warnings? I am worried because now I have no way to find out about a failed HDD unless I boot up and check in the BIOS.

Are you running RAID 10 or RAID 5? My guest File server performance is terrible right now. 10-20 MBPS with a minimum amount of activity

PS to configure the raid controller, I added another HDD, installed windows 2003 server on it, the P400 drivers, then the array config tools from HP, that way I was able to change the read/write cache ratio. I had to use the command line tool, the gui version would not find the controller. Also you cannot use the bootable CD from HP, it refuses. When I get a chance, I am going to try a PE based USBKey, I think the array config tool will work from there.

PS Gigabyte booting sucks. The P400 will not boot in my X58 either. Also, I was unable to get the USB ESXI booting working on 2 other GA-P35-DSL boards that I own. I didn’t try the P400 in them yet.

We had a meeting yesterday with our Vmware rep, hoping to get my hands on 4.0 Beta and try some things!

regards -frank-