HPE Storage Users Group

Hi Guys,

New to the forum so HELLO ALL!

We have a 7400 at our primary site with 120+ VMS (VMware ESX 5.5) and a few DBs backed onto it. AO with an SSD tier and the rest is SAS disk.

We have recently experienced a few issues, primarily with he ESX host/VM performance and VMware fails things like DRS because it doesn't map the VMDK properly, which points towards a storage issue.

My 'Control Memory' and 'Data Memory' seem very high.

Control memory is at 80% and data memory is 95% but this is a quiet day - not managed to check it when under load yet.

In terms of the disk, I/O seems normal for the speed the disks are rated at, if not a little low (thanks to AO/the SSDs!).

Is this something we should be worried about and is there any way to identify if this could be our issue?

Thanks for your help!
Ian

It's normal the 3PAR uses a dynamic caching mechanism, but it will try to keep both as fully populated as possible at all times. Nothing to worry about.

Thanks for your reply!

We have an issue where when we turn AV on, everything dies. I have just tested turning AV back on (at global level) and whilst the CPU percentage goes up ever so slightly, the Interrupts/s goes from under 5,000 to over 50,000 - same with the Switches/s. From under 5,000, to over 40,000.

Cache performance is also affected, from under 1000 counts/s, to over 10,000 with AV on.

Anyone got any experience with this and can perhaps recommend anything?

No idea about the context switches, but un-used RAM is wasted RAM, especially when it is a cache. Pretty much every modern OS tries to keep RAM as full as possible. This isn't an issue.

What do you mean by AV, host based antivirus ?

ianc1990 wrote:Thanks for your reply!

We have an issue where when we turn AV on, everything dies.

I just had nearly an identical situation yesterday. Are you by chance using McAfee MOVE?

Indeed - McAfee MOVE it was
Avoid it at all costs IMO.

I have now installed TrendMicro Deep security 9.0. Not only have the issues disappeared, but WHAT A DIFFERENCE to McAfee in terms of installation and also management. Documentation is also a pleasure to follow and read - so well written.

An amazing product and I cannot recommend it enough. (just make sure you go for Patch2 as it includes VMware 5.5 support amongst other things)

Drop me a message if you need any help with it

Ian