Usually performance issues are caused by not having the SAN (Server/Switches/Array) configured per best practices and in some instances FW and/or hardware drivers out of date. With ESX generally speaking 99% of the performance issues are resolved with: Delayed ACK Disabled Large Received Offload Disabled Ensure using VMware's Round Robin (with IO's per path changed to 3), or use the EQL's MEM (latest version is 1.2) multi-pathing If using multiple VMDK's (or RDM's), in the VM, each should have it's own Virtual SCSI adapter Update to the latest ESX build, switch and server updates Take a look at the links listed here first.  Also, review the Array Firmware release notes. ESX Best Practices en.community.dell.com/.../20434601.aspx EqualLigic Configuration Guide en.community.dell.com/.../2639.equallogic-configuration-guide.aspx Rapid Configuration Portal (Great Starting Place) en.community.dell.com/.../3615.rapid-equallogic-configuration-portal-by-sis.aspx Best Practices White Papers, look for SQL and ESX en.community.dell.com/.../2632.storage-infrastructure-and-solutions-team-publications.aspx Compatibility Matrix en.community.dell.com/.../20438558 -Joe
Our enterprise recently acquired new arrays for a new ERP system. I am the lead analyst programmer on the project and I'm at a novice-intermediate level concerning SAN storage, virtualization, and SQL performance tuning. I need to get up to speed and in command of what to expect from this extremely new equipment and the best practices to test and manage it. Our current ERP is on HP-UX and Informix stack so this is alien technology compared to where we are coming from.  We have a network services division that has been responsible for running the non-ERP side of the house using ESX and EqualLogic 6500's. This team is more experienced in general management of this equipment but has less time to dedicate to the new ERP project so I'm stepping up to help everyone get more confidence in the gear and educate myself about it. Whew. Lets get to the meat now. setup: dedicated 10Gb iSCSI network with Jumbo Frames enabled. No MPIO set. Dedicated storage pools for the 6210xs, 6210x (10K SAS), and 6510 (7200K). All on 10Gb. I'm using a tool called MS SQLIO to test the IOPS of the 6210XS. I used one of the default example test pattern from the "using SQLIO" doc.  nutshell: 6 minute test, sequential I/O,2 outstanding I/O requests, I/O request byte size of 256, and a 15 GB test file. Results were: H:\SQLIO>sqlio -kR -s360 -fsequential -o2 -b256 -LS -Fparam.txtsqlio v1.5.SGusing system counter for latency timings, 2343750 counts per secondparameter file used: param.txt        file h:\testfile.dat with 16 threads (0-15) using mask 0x0 (0)16 threads reading for 360 secs from file h:\testfile.dat        using 256KB sequential IOs        enabling multiple I/Os per thread with 2 outstandingusing specified size: 15000 MB for file: h:\testfile.datinitialization doneCUMULATIVE DATA:throughput metrics:IOs/sec:   133.93MBs/sec:    33.48latency metrics:Min_Latency(ms): 61Avg_Latency(ms): 238Max_Latency(ms): 1269  I performed another test using different parameters and had wildly different results:   H:\SQLIO>sqlio -kW -s10 -frandom -o8 -b8 -LS -Fparam.txt sqlio v1.5.SGusing system counter for latency timings, 2343750 counts per secondparameter file used: param.txt file h:\testfile.dat with 8 threads (0-7) using mask 0x0 (0)8 threads writing for 10 secs to file h:\testfile.dat using 8KB random IOs enabling multiple I/Os per thread with 8 outstandingusing specified size: 102400 MB for file: h:\testfile.datinitialization doneCUMULATIVE DATA:throughput metrics:IOs/sec: 24122.61MBs/sec:   188.45latency metrics:Min_Latency(ms): 0Avg_Latency(ms): 2Max_Latency(ms): 25   Novice question - this is obviously not a good result but I need to understand why my test is incorrectly configured or why the array is struggling to perform under these test conditions. Thank you for taking the time to read and respond. 
6210XS SQL Performance Benchmarking