Hi All,

First post. We received a VRTX Chassis with 2x M630 Blades last week for a new branch office setup with around 120 users.

I'd been mulling over the small footprint powerhouse for sometime and we eventually took the plunge. We wanted redundancy due to the remote nature of the office and lack of onsite technical presence. I'd read a whole lot around the PERC8 redundant controller performance issues when Write-Back was enabled and that the only way to resolve was to remove a controller/expander to enable write-back. Fortunately, Dell released firmware which resolved this issue and allowed write-back on dual PERC fault tolerant setups.

Our VRTX

2x m630's (2x XEON E5-2650 v3 CPU, 128GB RAM in each)

5x 200GB SSDs (RAID5 VD)

20x 1TB SAS 10k (RAID5 VD minus 1 as hotspare)

I've configured the VRTX chassis, storage and network as guided in various whitepapers and forum posts however, after installing windows on the hypervisor hosts (2x m630s) and setting up the CSV/MPIO i'm not convinced on the storage performance we're getting. Did we make a mistake somewhere or do these look right? The write speed doesn't look great to me.