Hello-
We were not totally happy with the disk io performance of proxmox on an HP Proliant 360p Gen8 with the 420i internal raid card, two xeons and 256GB RAM running a few Linux servers and a couple Windows 10 clients. After reading various posts, the belief was that the 420i was to blame. Purchased an LSI 9207-8i flashed to IT mode, tested it on a desktop PC and it doubled the speeds for reads and writes. Put it into the server, changed to a single SSD for the boot drive and connected the four old drives to the 9207. Created ZFS set, with raidz and no compression. Performance was horrible. ZFS began eating RAM and the CPUs kept spiking and io delay was jumpy but never close to 0. Changed parameters to try to limit the RAM being used by ZFS which worked to limit the CPU bottleneck but didn't solve the performance problems of high io delay.
Thought maybe a physical disk was bad. Destroyed the ZFS set and created a new set with three drives and added compression, otherwise defaults. Performance as bad as ever with this new setup, CPU spiking which then passes through to the VMs and causes their load to spike. Removed the RAM limitation for ZFS, no change other than it eats RAM again. We have monitoring on for some of the VMs and alerts began occurring whenever anything else attempts to use anything related to ZFS. One of the VMs runs a VoIP server and the lag is unbearable for voice calls. Only when we turn off the vms, maybe allowing one or two vms to run - using 32GB of RAM between them, do things seem "stable" like they were prior to the change to the 9207 and ZFS.
Therefore, I'd like to flash the 9207 back to normal mode and just create a RAID on there or somehow take advantage of at least some redundancy between drives without the performance penalty of zfs. But I can't seem to find any reliable source for the firmware that will allow me to flash back out of non-IT mode. I have to believe that the card and cable are good because of the extensive testing that we did prior to installing into the server. That testing was on Windows but there was a definite performance gain. Barring a reflash to non-IT mode, switching back to LVM doesn't seem to enable any raid-like features and I would be simply have to replicate or rsync VMs regularly and hope for the best. What other solutions exist that don't involve zfs?
We were not totally happy with the disk io performance of proxmox on an HP Proliant 360p Gen8 with the 420i internal raid card, two xeons and 256GB RAM running a few Linux servers and a couple Windows 10 clients. After reading various posts, the belief was that the 420i was to blame. Purchased an LSI 9207-8i flashed to IT mode, tested it on a desktop PC and it doubled the speeds for reads and writes. Put it into the server, changed to a single SSD for the boot drive and connected the four old drives to the 9207. Created ZFS set, with raidz and no compression. Performance was horrible. ZFS began eating RAM and the CPUs kept spiking and io delay was jumpy but never close to 0. Changed parameters to try to limit the RAM being used by ZFS which worked to limit the CPU bottleneck but didn't solve the performance problems of high io delay.
Thought maybe a physical disk was bad. Destroyed the ZFS set and created a new set with three drives and added compression, otherwise defaults. Performance as bad as ever with this new setup, CPU spiking which then passes through to the VMs and causes their load to spike. Removed the RAM limitation for ZFS, no change other than it eats RAM again. We have monitoring on for some of the VMs and alerts began occurring whenever anything else attempts to use anything related to ZFS. One of the VMs runs a VoIP server and the lag is unbearable for voice calls. Only when we turn off the vms, maybe allowing one or two vms to run - using 32GB of RAM between them, do things seem "stable" like they were prior to the change to the 9207 and ZFS.
Therefore, I'd like to flash the 9207 back to normal mode and just create a RAID on there or somehow take advantage of at least some redundancy between drives without the performance penalty of zfs. But I can't seem to find any reliable source for the firmware that will allow me to flash back out of non-IT mode. I have to believe that the card and cable are good because of the extensive testing that we did prior to installing into the server. That testing was on Windows but there was a definite performance gain. Barring a reflash to non-IT mode, switching back to LVM doesn't seem to enable any raid-like features and I would be simply have to replicate or rsync VMs regularly and hope for the best. What other solutions exist that don't involve zfs?