Friday 11 January 2013

Hyper-V: Creating a Fixed VHDX on 8x RAID 6 10K SAS Spindle Set: 130GB

Our previous blog posts on this subject:

For today’s test we are running the following setup:

  • Intel Server System R2208GZ4GC
    • Dual Xeon E5-2630
    • 128GB (16x 8GB) Kingston ECC
    • Intel Integrated RAID RMS25CB080 with BBU
    • 8x 600GB Seagate 10K SAS drives at 2.5”

The operating system is a freshly installed Windows Server 2012 Standard.

The RAID 6 array setup in the RAID controller’s BIOS is as follows:

  • Logical/Virtual Disk 0: 120GB
  • Logical/Virtual Disk 1: 3.1TB

We start the New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard in Hyper-V Manager and run through to create a fixed VHDX with a 130GB size.

image

Our test results are:

  • Start time: 13:29
  • End time: 13:31
    • image
  • Result: 2 Minutes

Yup. 2 Minutes.

As a just-in-case we ran this test again this time while watching the Performance Monitor:

image

  • Start: 13:37
  • Finish: 13:39
  • Disk Queue Length:
    • image
  • Disk Throughput:
    • image
  • All three measures:
    • imageimageimage
  • Result #2: 2 Minutes

Check out that throughput at 1GB/Second! And, Disk Queue Length hovering around 5 for the working virtual/logical disk.

This test demonstrates that a properly configured disk subsystem will perform as good or better than expected.

Now on to the SSD tests! :)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're not comparing apples to apples. This machine has 96 GB of RAM and the previous had far less along with no BBU which translates to a far less capable cache. It not just the disk subsystem that provides the edge here, but other factors as well.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Yes and no.

We have a number of different disk sets we have set up in this box to compare. Intel SSDs and Seagate 15K.2 (3Gbit) SAS spindle set.

The results were actually quite surprising.

Philip