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I have a couple of old Dell PowerEdge 2900 servers that have come free and I would like to use them to host a mail server cluster.

They are a bit old, but have been running workhorses for a while, and we have a 3rd one that we can use for spare parts. In fact, I took drives out of the 3rd one and split them between the 2 servers that I am going to use.

I've configured two of them with 8GB of memory each and 7 x 146GB SAS 15K drives. I've created that as a single RAID5 array. So total disks in each one is 7.

I've installed VMware ESXi 5.5 on them and setup an Ubuntu Server and a couple of Windows 2012 VM guests. In VMware, the entire RAID5 array is configured as a single datastore.

The plan is to use them as a cluster with Ubuntu + Zimbra and then the 2 x Windows Server VM guests are going to be Veeam proxys.

Everything works, but the VM guests seem unreasonably slow.

I've double checked that the array controller batteries are both in working order, and I don't have any other Dell hardware warnings to indicate any kind of problem.

Questions:

  • Has anyone else had any performance problems on similar hardware?
  • What are the most number of disks you should put into a RAID5 array for a VMware datastore?
  • Is there a more efficient way to configure the disks in terms of array volume type and size, and/or datastore size?
  • Are there any other things, besides the array battery, to check that could be hampering efficiency?
David Killingsworth
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1 Answers1

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You're right on the edge of what's acceptable for an ESXi 5.5 host. The processors on that host are about 5 generations old. RAID 5 is also a bit of an issue, but if you have an array battery and write caching enabled, it shouldn't be terrible.

I'd say that the gear is too old to be used for a new deployment. 8GB of RAM is tight. How have you apportioned it to the guests?

More than anything, how are you defining "unreasonably slow"? What processors are in use?

Finally, there could be a slight chance that you have a VMware revision issue. What build number of ESXi are you using, and are you willing to update to the most recent?

Community
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ewwhite
  • 201,205