Recommended Configuration Starwind and ESX Server

[softimpact]

Hi,
we are doing performance tests on starwind using deduplicate iscsi image on ESX 4.1 server.
The results showed considerable changes, depending on max file size and block size configuration.

What i have now is a hardware Raid10 4TB with 2 x 2TB deduplicate images 1024mb cache

And on ESX server i configured:
1. deduplicate image 2TB with Maximum File Size: 256GB and block size:1MB
2. deduplicate image 2TB with Maximum file siez: 2048GB and block size:8MB

and i noticed that the 2nd setup was much faster..

Would a file size of 1TB even faster?
Does the blocksize make a difference?
The block size defined in starwind is it the same?

Can you give me a recommendation what is the best configuration for a 2TB image on an ESX server ?

Thank you very much!

[Anatoly (staff)]

Would a file size of 1TB even faster?

Its not about the size, its about the cached data and queue hits in that cache and and deduplication ratio.

Does the blocksize make a difference?

It i - the smaller block size, the more resourses and time is required to deduplicate the data, which is obviously affects the performance.

The block size defined in starwind is it the same?

Would you please clarify that? When I was answering the previous question I asummed that we are talking about the DD block size, so correct me if I`m wrong please.

Can you give me a recommendation what is the best configuration for a 2TB image on an ESX server?

Mostly it depends on the ESX configuration. Everything that we have now is described in this document.


I hope it helped.