Erik,  It’s very difficult to know what is happening within the array without looking at the performance data. Since you don’t have an Analyzer license you can’t look at the data yourself, but you can see some statistics… If you open the Properties windows for both SPA and SPB you can see the Dirty Pages and SP Utilization values. They will even update periodically. In order for this to work, Statistics Logging needs to be enabled in the Array Properties dialog.  Also, work with your EMC Sales team to pull a NAZ file (encrypted Analyzer archive) from your array and have them look at it.. Most of the TCs (Sales Engineers) have tools to view the NAZ data.  You mentioned you have quite a few hosts… There are several reasons you could see slow downs. Cache Contention – ie: Forced Flushing will slow down the whole array even if it’s only caused by a subset of data. Backend disks are too busy.. This will also cause forced flushing Queue Full on the front end ports. If there are many hosts, and each host HBA is using a high value for Execution Throttle, you could exceed the queue depth on the array ports (max 1600 per port) which will cause a Queue Full condition. This pauses IO at the port briefly and hosts respond by setting their own queue depth to 1 for some period of time, gradually increasing it back to defaults.  All of these conditions can be seen with Analyzer data. I believe the Queue Full’s can be seen in ESX logs but I can’t remember the text of the message.  Richard J Anderson
Hello- We have a CX4-240 array that has recently had alot of ESX and non ESX hosts added to it via the fibre protocol.  No iSCSI connections.  I am starting to get alot of slowness complaints, but don't have a licensed version of Navishphere Analyzer to look at the data.  I do have VKernel to monitor my vm performance and it is indicating I/O issues and high latency on my datastores.  I have logged into some of my vm and non vm machines and have run Iometer to capture some baselines.  Now, I am trying to find out from the user community what type of throughput I should expect.  With Iometer on a system, using Access Specifications 32K, 0% Read, 0% random I am seeing 25 MB/s.  This particular system has its own LUN and is using 4 GB fiber disks.  When I run similar tests on systems with backend SATA disks, surpisingly my throughput is similar.   On another array with much less I/O using the same Iometer tool I am seeing 40 MB/s.  Any thoughts on other ways I should be testing and/or what I should expect to see?  I know if I call my rep they will tell my to buy FAST cache, but I don't have the $ right now....  As always, thank you for your thoughts.....   Erik
Clariion CX4-240 Throughput Values