Homeserver Forum

Hello everyone,
i encountered severe problems running WHS with RAID. System Configuration is as follows:
A8NVM CSM Board with AMD 4800+ and 4GB RAM
3WARE 9690SA 8i SATA/SAS Controller with 4x Samsung HD501LJ 500GB (RAID5/Unit01) 4x Seagate ST31000340NS 1TB (RAID5/Unit02)
Nforce onboard RAID Controller with 2x HD753LJ 750GB (RAID0) and 2xHD753LJ 750 GB (RAID0)
Chenbro 41416B Chassis
Zippy 700W PSU
Software:
Antivir Professional Server
VMWare Workstation 6 ACE
Perfect Disk 2008

Unit01 and Unit02 are added to WHS Server filespace.
Running WHS on this machine as data server and productive test system leads to constant degradinig of mostly Unit02, but it seems that both RAID0 seem to run exceptionally bad (bad R/W performance). Productive test systems are launched over VMware Workstation and dont cause any problems except bad performance. Since i use the german version no PP1 is installed due to availability. So far i figure that data corruption bug is responsible for the problems. The bug may be linked to usage of Perfect Disk 2008 and or Antivir Server. I will now wait for PP1 german to be launched and if this doesnt solve the problems switch to Server 2003 RC2 which i didnt take in the first place because Homeserver seemed to be cheaper and easier to use offering all functionallity i needed: data server/web access/backup/remote access/cert server/VPN server (i already have experience with server 2003). But for now it seems that the drive extender ruins it all.

Hi!

I would also assume that the bad R/W performance is caused by the drive extender, but you have to consider that you'll never reach a performance similar to hardware RAID (even if your storage disks are RAID-arrays).

Additionally, it is not a good idea to run VMs out of the WHS storage pool anyway.

I would suggest that you exclude one of the two arrays from the storage pool and run your VMs from there, that should give you way better performance.

Regards, Alex

Hello everyone thx @ Alex for the reply,
i finally figured out the reasons for the crappy performance. It was related to the nforce IDE drivers. Since for my board (A8VMCSM) there are no WS2003 drivers i used the XP ones that claim to be optimized for memory throughput under XP. Exactly that causes major problems under Server 2003 Systems causing memory overflows and overall crappy RW performance. So if u use "older" nforce boards with 430/6150 chipsets uninstall IDE driver after having installed the driver package and everything is fine. I cant wait now till PP1 is released to see if data corruption issues are solve so i can pull my RAID in performance mode again. Anyway a lot of problem around here seem to result in using hardware with drivers that are not build for 2003 Servers resulting in unexpected behaviour .

Greets Lars