Hello fellow sysadmins!
I've assembled a whitebox system with a SuperMicro motherboard, case, 8GB of memory and a single quad core Xeon processor.
I have two 9650SE-8LPML cards (8 ports each) in each server with 12 1TB SATA drives total. Three drives per "lane" on each card.
CentOS 5.2 x86_64.
I'm looking for advice on tuning this thing for performance. Especially for the role of performing as either an NFS datastore for VMware or an iSCSI one.
I set up two volumes (one for each card); one RAID6 and one RAID5. I used the default 64K block size and am trying various filesystems in tandem with it. I stumbled across the following recommendations on 3Ware's site:
echo "64" > /sys/block/sda/queue/max_sectors_kb blockdev --setra 16384 /dev/sda echo "512" > /sys/block/sda/queue/nr_requests
But am wondering if there are other things I should be looking at, including changing the IO scheduler. Any particular options I should use with filesystem creation to match up with my RAID block size?
I also noted that there is a newer 3Ware driver (2.26.08.004) available than the one that comes stock with CentOS 5.2 (2.26.02.008). Not sure if I can expect performance improvement by "upgrading", and I imagine I'd have to mess with my initrd file in any case or boot with a driver disk option and blacklist the built-in driver...
Thanks for any feedback!
Ray