esxi raid card replacement

[Zargon]

I am having some issues with my storage on my esxi 5.1 box

currently I have a perc 5i in it, none of the drives are showing any smart errors, the raid thinks its healthy, one raid 1, one raid 10 array


I am having some disk IO issues, the only logs to back up this claim is from VMware complaining about drive latency being in the tens of millions of ms, ie seconds of drive latency

it wanted to take 18 hours to copy a 12 gb file the other day, which was a test, after I notice I was having issues steaming media from my HTCP


I am looking at sas/sata PCI-express cards, that have 2 or more connectors

was curious if anyone had card replacement suggestions(I see megaraids are cheap and plentiful and seem mosly easily supported by esxi....)

or other ways to troubleshoot this

sata-300 cards should be fine, as I have WD Greens, and am looking to replace them with Reds in the next year, as I will need more storage, and since I have started utilizing this box more....I could use faster storage

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I wouldn't assume it's the RAID card. We had a similar problem with the array in one of our SANs and it turned out to be a single disk that was holding back the entire stripe.

Of course, the controller software lets us see per-disk latency. Your RAID card might not. So I'm not sure how to troubleshoot that on your setup, just that it's a possibility.

Otherwise, I'm pretty lazy, so I'd just swap the card like for like.

 

[Zargon]

I would go like for like, but the perc 5 is pretty dated, and its likely going to be an extremely cheap upgrade.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Are you sure the RAID will be portable to a different/newer card? Or are you going to have to rebuild and restore anyway?

 

[Zargon]

Ill just rebuild and restore, I have almost all the data backed up anyways, moving the VM images wont be much of a hassle

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Sounds like a plan.

 

[Zargon]

ah more reading found a hitch with the cheaper megaraids that are sata300


capped at 2tb drives.....

 

[Zargon]

Are you sure the RAID will be portable to a different/newer card? Or are you going to have to rebuild and restore anyway?

I swapped in my spare perc 5i and it immediately complained about the config and wanted to fix it, so I let it and bam.....everything was recognized and still there

(yes I finally did this 3 months later, the VMware box actually crashed hard around.....Halloween)

this is because I forgot to order cables for my serverraid replacement card


I'm still having interesting issues with my VM's performance

however, my datastores are all available properly, so I am hoping to atleast get more proper backups

I fear I may need to replace my aging 500gb hdd's that make up my VM datastore

 

[Data-Medics]

I'd say it's most likely a bad drive, possibly with slow reading sectors. Which isn't bad enough to cause SMART issues yet.

However you also might want to check the power management settings of your RAID card. If it's putting drives to sleep that will cause lots of fun issues. And if you are using WD Green drives, you're certain to have issues.

 

[Zargon]

yes they are greens

this is a relatively new issue though, odd it pop up after 4 years of not happening

Im updating the perc's FW right now, and installing some megaraid vibs so I can run MSM and see if maybe the battery went bad on it.

I do have a newer megaraid to swap in, I just need to order cables for it

but I figure I might as well do some learning first