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Performance Issue DSM 6.2.X on ESXI


SinnedNima

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Hello dear comrades!

first thanks for the guides and troubleshooting done by you guys! It was a great help for setting everything up.

Dispite the great help, i'm facing some problems, mainly regarding performance.

 

ESXI 6.7 U3
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2670 0 @ 2.60GHz

32 GB RAM

3x3TB RAID5

4x256GB RAID5 SSD

 

So i did set up everything, for the installation i went with SATA, using the  DS 3615xs image and after that i should be able to use other controller. Sad truth i can't seem to use SCSI
so id tried to make a RDM mapping with somewhat of a success, from 3-6MB/s, i got up to 20-25 MB/s long time write speed.
Download is no issue, can load with the maximum 112MB/s. What bugs me the most is, that it starts of fine with writing at about 70-80MB/s. My drives are hitting the 330-340MB/s range (did the benchmark inside Storage Manager), so they can't be the bottle neck

 

Does anyone have any idea what i can try next?

 

Thanks in advance!

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Well your drives are CMR, so that isn't the problem (DT02 drives are SMR).

 

LSI is not the sweet spot anymore for XPE (AHCI controllers are better supported).  You did not mention which DSM version you were running, just the platform.

 

I have two suggestions if you are feeling adventurous:

  1. Try and run the LSI controller passthrough and see if you get any different results.
  2. Try DSM 6.1.7 and see if you get any better throughput.
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Thanks for the advice:
i'm running 6.2.1-24922-update 2, updated everything to the newest version and was facing the same problems

 

1. can't do that, the main storage for ESXI is connected through it. The RAIDs are Hardware based. I'm trying to find a way to passthrough the onboard sata controller.
It is an Asmedia and as far as i have seen, the most compatile.

 

2. Okay will look it up, but why would it be better with that version?

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So you are RDM'ing your RAID array?  I don't know how you can do that and use it for ESXi storage at the same time.

 

Best results are when DSM sees the drives as natively as possible.  This is harder to do when you put the restrictions on your system as you have.

 

If you can't come up with another datastore for ESXi, you should consider running individual RAID 0 for each disk and then assign some of them to ESXi and some of them via RDM to a vSATA controller for DSM.

 

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Short summary of todays work:

 

- set up a vm with DSM 6.1.7
- successfully connected it via SCSI and VMXNET3 (i tried nearly all SCSI modes: ParaVirtual and SAS with virtual/physical, i even reverted back to E1000)

 

aaaand .... nothing. Sad truth i'm running an IBM variant of said LSI controller and i do believe that it goes bonkers with that one.

I get it to perform with around 35MB/s write speed but that's all i could do with the effort i put in today.

The synopsis of this funny ride is:
- Build a Synology NAS baremetal with AMD Boards (because of the onbaord Asmedia controller) or

- get yourself compatible non IBM messed up controller cards and / nor

- Be sure to check your ESXI home lab system for compatibility with PCI passthrough (bacause yeah, it would be to great if that could be done with every system and free for all connected devices)
---------------------------------------------------

I could go with Proxmox (migrated from it to ESXI last week, mainly for not getting rusty at work and expanding knowledge)

I'm going with some other distribution but i will come back again. Just put to much money for the whole system to be ESXI compatible and don't want to build a seperate NAS for now.

 

The only thing i didn't try, because it was obvious that it wouldn't work, was to revert the RDM, format the Disks to VMFS and try some vmdk & controller combinations. I do think that this would run into similar problems.

Edited by SinnedNima
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Sooo... after an existential life crisis, two broken SAS Controllern and really annoying little things like thermal throttling of the controller and some cache settings in the WebBIOS of the LSI hba, the deed is done.

Everything works great, no performance issues and RDM is working flawlessly. Running now DS3615xs, DSM 6.2.3-25426 Update 3 on ESXI 6.7U3.

 

@flyride Thank you very much for your support and patience 😘😅
 

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