[CentOS] 3Ware 9650SE tuning advice

Thu Jan 15 23:04:59 UTC 2009
Rob Kampen <rkampen at kampensonline.com>


Ray Van Dolson wrote:
> 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
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>   
Ray, I've had good performance from xfs with large filesystems.
What kind of files are you looking to use, lots of smaller files or 
large media files??
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