Ice_Black

Yes I knew that I think the speed has improved slightly. In the VM setting, it was set to: Number of virtual sockets: 1 Number of cores per sockets: 2 I have changed other way round to: Number of virtual sockets: 2 Number of cores per sockets: 1 I don't understand what that mean but the transfer speed seem to be improved, what did you set to?

It has been a lot more than 4-5 hours patiently waiting..

Anyone here installed ESXi with UnRAID VM? I need you to do a quick test for me please. 1) Let me know what the speed transfer you get when you copy a file to a user share with cache-enabled? 2) Also what the speed transfer you get when you copy a file directly directly to a cache disk? When I copy a file to a user share with cache-enabled I only get max 35MB/sec, however when I copy to a Cache disk directly it is a lot faster around 60-70MB/sec. Are you having same issue? I posted a thread at http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=27654.0

Great!

WeeboTech Have you read my recent reply here?

I have installed unRAID 5.Xrc under ESX 5.1 on a microserver with 16GB of ram. I allocated 1GB to unRAID. Using internal SATA, External SATA, ASmedia and SIL3134, SIL3132 cards I get 'raw' read rates from 95MB/s up to 180MB/s on the ASmedia 6GB/s SATA card. These are raw DD reads of the hard drive itself, bypassing any form of network or filesystem reads. When writing to a drive without parity, the speeds varied anywhere from 90MB/s up to 195MB/s depending on how much data I was writing and whatever filesystem allocation there was. i.e. journaling absorbs some of the raw speed for writing. I used port multipliers also and they were in the 100-120MB/s range for a single drive on the Silicon Image chipset and up to 190MB/s on the ASmedia SATA III card. Tests were done using the Seagte 3TB 7200 RPM drive. I used vmkfstools with the -z and -a pvscsi option to RDM the entire disk. My tests without RDM proved to be quite slow and almost pointless to have resierfs on top of a virtual .vmdk container file on top of a VMFS data store. Even with fast RAID0 using 2 3TB drives, it was painfully slow and lengthy just to format. 1. Format the data store (fast). 2. Create the .vmdk (about hour and half). 3. Format the reiserfs filesystem (40 minutes or so). RDM of the disk was almost as fast as native bare metal unraid. Very close in speed. As far as transfer over the network. I did not test it. I knew if unRAID could read/write to the disk under ESX as fast, or nearly as fast, as bare metal, the rest would work at acceptable levels. What network adapter did you choose? E1000 or VMXNET? What SCSI adapter did you use for the RDM disk (if you configured it that way). I found the LSI SAS adapter to be fast, but it bottle necked at around 120 MB/s. I immediately reconfigured with the PVSCSI adapter and the speed went up to 180MB/s. as a test do this to see your raw hard drive read capability. dd if=/dev/sd? of=/dev/null bs=4096 count=1024000 Where ? is the device's last character. This will read 4GB raw from the hard drive. It will show you the maximum speed you could possibly get from the hard drive for sequential data on the outer tracks. There are all sorts of file system references that occur, so file reads on a formatted file system will be slower. you can do the same to write a file and read it if the hard drive is mounted echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches # drop pagecache, dentries and inodes dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/disk1/test.dd bs=4096 count=1024000 echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches # drop pagecache, dentries and inodes dd if=/mnt/disk1/test.dd of=/dev/null bs=4096 count=1024000 Oops, I've missed your reply somehow. If I understand correctly, you using SIL3134, SIL3132 cards to connect with SAD enclosure? I don't have a SAD enclosure. I am using internal drive bays. I used vmkfstools with the -z but without -a pvscsi option to RDM the disks. For example: vmkfstools -a lsilogic -z /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____SAMSUNG_HD204UI_________________________S2H7J90B619xxx______ disk1.vmdk Maybe I should try again -a pvscsi option? I have choosed VMXNET network adapter. root@Tower:~# dd if=/dev/md1 of=/dev/null bs=4096 count=1024000 1024000+0 records in 1024000+0 records out 4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 30.097 s, 139 MB/s echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches # drop pagecache, dentries and inodes root@Tower:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/disk1/test.dd bs=4096 count=1024000 1024000+0 records in 1024000+0 records out 4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 109.043 s, 38.5 MB/s root@Tower:~# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches # drop pagecache, dentries and inodes root@Tower:~# dd if=/mnt/disk1/test.dd of=/dev/null bs=4096 count=1024000 1024000+0 records in 1024000+0 records out 4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 32.1857 s, 130 MB/s Poor read speed from Unraid Samba to Windows. Between 50-60MB/s read. Even on Cache disk.

Has anyone installed Esxi on MicroServer with Unraid virtual machine? What Read speed are you getting if you copy large file from Samba to your windows disk? I am only getting 55MB/s read

Thank you I've got it to work and really fast boot!

"Do not change the volume label on the .vmdk file to UNRAID" Do you mean the name of the VM in ESXi?

Many of us use the Nexus Double Twin to add 2x 3.5" drives: I might try that. Are they both connected to PCI controller? Other option is connect at the back of HP server and also to a motherboard. Don't know which is better.

How do you all setup unRaid on MicroServer? Mine are: - MicroServer N40L - 250GB Cache drive - 2 x 2TB Array and 2TB parity drive (all connected on onboard SATA) - UnRaid v4.7 - Plugin: SABnzbd

I have not 'yet' but plan to. Sometimes I max out the machine just so I don't have to do it later on. There are many times in the past I did not max things out and it became hard to find parts. With the newer CPU and extra ram I plan to have ESXi a slackware dev environment and an XP instance for utorrent. (either that or put it on my laptop). FWIW I'm getting excellent read speeds with the newer Seagate 3TB 7200 RPM drives. They have consistantly outperformed my expectations by leaps and bounds. At least for the preclearing step. I'll be posting benchmarks as I test the two drive setups for parity speeds and write speeds. This should be an interesting comparison. What are the speed differences from 5400 rpm parity to 7200 rpm parity. Any suggested benchmarking I should do? I was planning to put 4 drives in the array. Testing with a 5400 RPM parity drive, then a 7200 RPM parity drive. Thats great, do let me know what Unraid and Windows performance like when you install ESXi on HP MicroServer I wanted to do this soon... Do you think I should get Hardware Controller Card?

Nice! Why do you need a big ram? Is it because you installed ESXI ?

Ah yes I did lol. Any suggestion which Server Case I should buy? I wanted something small like MicroServer N40L, then I need to buy a motherboard with much powerful CPU

I played with ESXi on N36L shortly but because (1) you can not passthrough a hardware controller to a VM and (2) CPU is incredibly weak for any practical application, it makes little sense to run ESXi on a microserver other than for testing and experimenting. How it can make sense to run ESXi on a microserver when you say CPU is incredibly weak for any practical application? I am considering selling N40L so I can build my own mini server (same server case size) with much powerful CPU and better motherboard that support passthrough.

Have any of you tried installing ESXI on N40L and what the performance like? is it too much hassle?

Sounds about right. I've had faster writes on the cache drive when it's 7200rpm. I have just patched modified bios - now im getting 80 MB/sec on cache drive

What the transfer speed do you get on cache drive? Im only getting 40MB to 50 MB/sec write on Array, maximum 30MB sec