Hello Friends.
I am an SQA Engineer and need to do a lot of testing on the applications in windows and want better performance.
I have gone through a lot of articles but could not find the correct answer for my questions.
I need help from the experts like you to better understand the concepts and the configuration which I need.
To give a short details of what I do and my requirements.
- Install various OS on daily basis. (May be an average of installing Windows 3 times in a day)
- Installing Huge amount of Applications.
- Adding or removing various Hotfix from OS and other apps multiple times.
- Taking a lot of snapshots and deleting/merging them.
- Rebooting the VM's very frequently (May be once every 30 min).
- Copping TB's worth of data between VM's (On Same Host)
Details of the test machine which I have for performing my task. ESX 5.1 with U1
- Power Edge 11G R510 rack server with all drivers and firmware's updated.
- 2 * (Six-core Intel® Xeon® processors 5500) = 12 Cores running at 2700Mhz
- Memory 128GB DDR3 1333MHz
- PERC 6/i RAID Controller
- Hot-plug hard drive: 8 * 1TB 3.5” SAS (7.2K) =7.5 TB in total currently configured in RAID 0
- RAID 0 Stripe size currently set to 128k. Disk Alignment verified.
- Intel Ethernet X520 DA2 Dual-Port 10 Gigabit Server Adapter. (Configured with 9K Jumbo Frames)
VM Configuration: ESX 5.1 with U1
- Every VM has latest VMTools installed.
- All VM's configured with 4 vCPU and 16 GB of Memory per VM.
- At any given time not more than 5 VM's are running and the work is usually done only on one VM at one time.
Even after having a good configuration in hardware it takes a lot of time to perform the above activities.
- OS installation takes around 30 - 45 Min.
- Windows Boot time around 2 Min
- Installing an application like .Net or SQL or Exchange takes around 1 Hour each.
- Even transferring large files between VM's or running backups of the VM from guest runs at around 20MB/Sec which seems very slow.
- I do not need to protect any data on the machine as after testing the VM is deleted and almost every 3 days the whole datastore is cleared.
Q1. I need to know will "RAID 0" help me in this scenario and what stripe size should I use for best random R/W.
Q2. Need to know if I do a write of a 4k file in guest since VMFS block size is of 1M does it actually write 1M on the physical disk.
Does this actually translate to 1M divided by 8 disk all writing their 128k strip block.