VSphere Upgrade Saga: Adding Fusion-io to an HP BL460c. June 16, 2014 Edward Haletky Leave a comment. Which can be found under the drivers for VMware ESXi 5.0 and not the VMware vSphere 5.1 link off the HP BL460c Gen 8 drivers and support page. Since this moves around, a link is difficult to specify, but if you have ever downloaded drivers.
I recently purchased two HP 380P Gen 8 servers with 365GB IODrive2s for VDI using Vmware View 5.2.
After using the latest HP vmware 5.1 update 1 ESX installer and then installing the Fusion-io drivers for ESX I was able to format the drive as VMFS5, create a pool and put the replica on the Fusion-io.
All of these seemed to run about as fast as our two 15k SAS drives in RAID0. Unsatisfied with the VDI experience we decide to create a pool with all components on the Fusion-io. The speed still didn't seem on par with what the spec sheets state. I finally did a test copy of from the Fusion-io to itself (from the ESXi ssh shell) and I am currently getting about 1GB per minute transfer rate. The white papers claim I should be getting around 500MBps.
Here are some tests:
from 4 drive RAID10 15k SAS to itself:cp VMware-VIMSetup-all-5.1.0-947939.iso test.iso takes 37s
from 4 drive RAID10 15k SAS to Fusion-io:cp VMware-VIMSetup-all-5.1.0-947939.iso /vmfs/volumes/fusion2/test.iso takes 34 sec
from Fusion-io to itself:cp test.iso test2.iso takes 78 sec
from my desktop SSD to itself: 32s
7200rpm hard drive to itself: 115s
I currently have a ticket open with HP and VMware but I am essentially getting fingerprinting. I am hoping someone in the community has solved my issues.
Outputs from IOMeter using 8 workers with the all in one access spec for 1 hour:
ewwhiteDell Fusion Io Drivers
Fusion Io Support
1 Answer
Everything is working now. Thanks for all of you help. I wasn't testing the card vs the sas array hard enough. Once I used random writes and reads in testing and saturated the cache on the raid controller, the fusionio beat the array. 168MB/s vs 6 MB/s. I was also able to speed everything up in VDI by enabling a portion of the fusion to be used as host cache.