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tomtomek

3 Posts

24033

September 21st, 2011 04:00

7.2k or 15k drives? - adding MD1200 to MD3200i

Hi all,

We are currently running VMWare setup with 2x r610 hosts and MD3200i fully populated with 300GB 15k drives. We need to get more storage space now so I was looking at adding MD1200 to the setup.
The question is - will I see performance degradation if I choose 7.2k 2TB nearline sas drives as opposed to 600GB 15k ones? Storage is used for VM dev environment, all VMs running Windows 2008 web server and a few sql servers.

Basically will the difference be noticeable?

I believe it all depends on the environment.... what can I look at in terms of measuring current system to be able to tell whether 7.2k drives will be sufficient?

Cheers,
Tom

JOHNADCO

2 Intern

 • 

847 Posts

September 21st, 2011 12:00

"Hi all,

We are currently running VMWare setup with 2x r610 hosts and MD3200i fully populated with 300GB 15k drives. We need to get more storage space now so I was looking at adding MD1200 to the setup.
The question is - will I see performance degradation if I choose 7.2k 2TB nearline sas drives as opposed to 600GB 15k ones? Storage is used for VM dev environment, all VMs running Windows 2008 web server and a few sql servers.

Basically will the difference be noticeable?

I believe it all depends on the environment.... what can I look at in terms of measuring current system to be able to tell whether 7.2k drives will be sufficient?

Cheers,
Tom"
I'd think even decently busy webservers would be OK on it. Tiering your storage is very wise in my opinion. Of course you would put the VM's on the new slower drives that don't demand it. I'd keep any Exchange and SQL on the fast drives myself. It really comes down to the demand for IOPS of the individual servers. 1/2 the speed, I'd say you will feel it some. But then again, running out of space again is going to stink for you. We tier our MD storage. 15K SAS, Nearline SAS, and even SATA. (we tend to only run our backup servers (VM's) on the SATA) The Nearline SAS performs well enough for us though for anything except our Exchange and SQL servers.

JOHNADCO

2 Intern

 • 

847 Posts

September 21st, 2011 13:00

"Hi all,

We are currently running VMWare setup with 2x r610 hosts and MD3200i fully populated with 300GB 15k drives. We need to get more storage space now so I was looking at adding MD1200 to the setup.
The question is - will I see performance degradation if I choose 7.2k 2TB nearline sas drives as opposed to 600GB 15k ones? Storage is used for VM dev environment, all VMs running Windows 2008 web server and a few sql servers.

Basically will the difference be noticeable?

I believe it all depends on the environment.... what can I look at in terms of measuring current system to be able to tell whether 7.2k drives will be sufficient?

Cheers,
Tom"
PS: A quick look at your performance data for disks, datastores, virtual disks should be able to tell you are the demanding VM's. Any VM generating latency spikes, read/write requests,heavy I/O spikes is creating demand. Vmware is pretty cool because it easily presents historical data decently well.

Make sure you give VM's enough ram to never swap to disk too. It just creates a false sense of high IOPS demand from VM's that do it.

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