Performance Test Environment For Realistic Application Benchmarks - HP LeftHand P4000 - SAN Solutions Application Notes

Disk Formatting Best Practices
• Use the default block size, or allocation unit size, unless a particular
application specifies an alternate size. Microsoft Exchange should be on
volumes formatted with a block size of 4096 bytes.
• Partitions should be created starting at sector 128 to align the offset to
64KB using Diskpar or Diskpart.
Storage Node Configuration Best Practices
• Bond networks interfaces for network redundancy and more bandwidth
using Adaptive Load Balancing (ALB).
• Use RAID level 5 or 10 for disk redundancy within storage modules.
• Enable SAN/iQ iSCSI Load Balancing on authentication groups for
Windows servers
• Install the DSM software driver to enable fault-tolerant paths to the SAN
modules while also increasing available bandwidth to the SAN for
maximum performance

Performance Test Environment for Realistic Application Benchmarks

Performance data was gathered using enterprise class servers with the
following attributes:
• 2.8GHz dual core Intel Xeon processor
• 4 gigabytes of RAM
• Dual gigabit Ethernet network adapters (bonded using balance ALB)
• All equipment connected to the same gigabit Ethernet switch
The iSCSI SAN configurations included a dedicated group of three storage
nodes comprised of:
• Single management group with a single cluster including all
storage modules
• Storage modules were configured in either RAID 5 with volumes further
protected by SAN/iQ Network RAID Level-2 (2-way Replication).
• iSCSI sessions were load balanced across the clusters using SAN/iQ iSCSI
Load Balancing
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