Dell R210 II alternative SATA/SAS RAID controllers?

There is no need to advise against purchasing Dell ... just advise clients to invest wisely in its hardware (against low-end hardware like the R210 II and the low-end controllers).  I would never advise anyone to get anything but the PERC 6, H700, H710 for internal storage, regardless of what they will be doing - these are on par from what we have always expected of Dell hardware.  The S-series and the low-end H310 and H200 fall far short of what I would consider to be deserving of the name "PERC".

There is no "unofficial" compatibility list ... the only controllers Dell can say will work in the low-end R210 II is the H200 and the S-series controllers (S100 (variation of Intel's onboard RAID) and the S300).  You might try searching the forums for someone who has tried something different.  LSI controllers will "probably" work, but as they won't be validated, they may not work as expected.

What OS are you running?  Could that be playing any role here (after all, 5MB/s sounds low for any controller, including some USB :))?  Running a software (OS-managed) RAID may be preferable to any of the "Dell" options, since their good controllers are also not validated for use in this server (although they too may work).

Fully agree in regards to advising to buy Dell. After enough years in the industry I still prefer Dell over other brands. And yes, the R210 II is an entry level server. But even entry servers should have reasonable performance :)

Agree about the H200 and H310 series. Unfortunately sometimes you're stuck with needing a 1U server, and in all other respects R210 II fit the requirement.

The OS installed is ESXi 5.1 - I've tried different driver packs for ESXi (from the integrated one to alternatives) with none bringing any detectable performance increase. Software RAID could only be done by actually provisioning 2 virtual hard drives (1 on each physical drive) and then establishing RAID within the VM. Will probably test if I have enough time, since this server is not entering production like this.

I've searched for any kind of compatiblity reports for R210 II (and T110 II which seems quite similar, apart from the enclosure type) and found no reports whatsoever. That's why I decided to ask here if anyone did manage to pair the R210 II with a reasonable SAS/SATA RAID controller.

Trying to source an H700 to test the functionality of the said controller in the R210 II and if it works reasonably well advising the client to get it. I can't really advise them to spend money and cross my fingers it works :)

Thanks for your reply though :)

Did you try the Dell version of ESXi?

en.community.dell.com/.../20184182.aspx

I don't see R210 II (or it's "brother" T110 II) on the compatibility list so I've skipped it for the time being.

Using plain vanilla ESXi 5.1 with LSI SMI-S providers for health monitoring and built-in LSI drivers. (tried the performance without SMI-S providers without change).

D.

Just as an update how horrible the disk i/o situation really is ... again, do note that disk write cache is enable and the RAID array is fully built.

URL: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18863800/20130123-0212-ESXi-data-performance.jpg

The first box marks the period where a Microsoft Windows 8 Enterprise Evaluation ISO was downloaded from Microsoft to a Windows 7 VM running on ESXi 5.1 on R 210 II.

The second box marks the period where the said ISO was then uploaded from within the Windows 7 VM to the hypervisor's datastore. The write speed does not exceed 6.5MB/s.

There were no other VMs doing any disk i/o, the CPU load was very low:

URL: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18863800/20130123-0221-ESXi-cpu-load.jpg

The Windows 7 VM had 1 vCPU and 4 GB of RAM allocated and is fully patched.

:(

D.

Well, found my solution.

It seems that the LSI SMI-S provider (the health provider for the vSphere console) is not too comfortable with Dell PERC H200 (or LSI 9211-8i) and seriously slows down disk i/o.

In my case Atto disk bencmark in a Windows 7 VM for 0.5kB (QD=4) transfer_size went from 12kBps write/30kBps read to 6650kBps write/7022kBps read which is now in the expected range and I'm perfectly fine with :)

To find out your version of the LSI SMI-S provider:

$ esxcli software vib list | grep lsiprovider

I've removed mine with:

$ esxcli software vib remove -n lsiprovider (do this in maintenance mode, and reboot afterwards)

Of course this leaves us without any kind of disk subsystem monitoring, so I've "bodged" a small disk status monitoring script that sends an e-mail if it detects an abnormal situation. Not the best solution - but better than nothing :)

D:

And just as a closer ... the H200 was replaced by a LSI9260-4i and it works flawlessly :)

D.

Damirc, so the LSI9260-4i works good on your r210 ii and esxi? please give us feedback, i have the same server and im looking for a better raid controller. thanks