Overview
A while back I picked up an HP DL160 G6 to replacing my aging Dell PowerEdge 2950 II as my NexentaStor server. The end result was less than perfect and I was never happy with the performance of the server. I was seeing performance decrease over the old PE2950II and the two on-board NIC’s were not sufficient to feed all the servers and workstations with data. So I decide to scrap it and rebuild from scratch. With that in mind, I picked up yet another Dell PowerEdge R710 from Kijiji.
This R710 one comes with two X5550 2.6Ghz Quad Core CPU’s and 96GB of RAM. I’ll pilfer some of that RAM as it comes with 8GB sticks and put it to good use elsewhere. Replace the 8GB sticks with 4GB that I have abundance of for a total of 72GB of RAM.
1) Are you using Dell H200 external to replace PERC 6/E that connects MD1000?
What is the model?
2) Do you have an update on how the setup is going and performance?
Yes. I’m using the H200 to connect to the MD1000.
I’ve been very happy with NexentaStor performance in general. On the R710 the thing absolutely flies, especially if you combine with it 4 Lane iSCSI Round Robin MPIO. With the caching system of Nexenta, VM’s on the ESXi host absolutely fly. It’s actually funny watching VM’s reboot because it happens almost instantaneously. I do have a 10Gbe project brewing as I want to switch to NFS and get an additional boot in random performance and simplify my network setup. Right now I have 4 NIC ports going to every host just for iSCSI traffic.