Hey all,
I'm looking for an alternative to the M1015 card that I've been using for the past few years under Ubuntu + FlexRAID. I'm getting a bit sick of the unRAID/FlexRAID type solutions and decided to go with ZFS on Linux as it's now quite stable.
With the previous solutions, write speeds were never an issue as data was only ever being written directly to 1 disk at a time. Speeds were pretty good. I've setup a test ZFS box under Debian 7.3 and passed through my M1015 to do some trial runs.
I know the M1015 doesn't do write-back caching and by design, ESXi leaves caching to the HBA's. All this to mean that the M1015 under an ESXi VM using ZFS is a recipe for horrible write performance (we're talking 13-20MB/s with no compression and no deduplication). If I boot debian from a LiveCD and import my ZFS pool, my writes go up to 50/60-100+MB/s with the drives still connected to the M1015. So I know it's related to the ESXi caching.
I've looked at a few other cards (specifically the M5014/5015/5016), but these don't do JBOD/Passthrough (most posts tell people to go grab the M1015).
What options are available out there? I'm hoping there's something that has some cache, supports write-back on the hardware itself, allows me to do JBOD/Passthrough and works in ESXi. I know that may be asking a lot - hoping experts here can chime in.
Cheers,
I'm looking for an alternative to the M1015 card that I've been using for the past few years under Ubuntu + FlexRAID. I'm getting a bit sick of the unRAID/FlexRAID type solutions and decided to go with ZFS on Linux as it's now quite stable.
With the previous solutions, write speeds were never an issue as data was only ever being written directly to 1 disk at a time. Speeds were pretty good. I've setup a test ZFS box under Debian 7.3 and passed through my M1015 to do some trial runs.
I know the M1015 doesn't do write-back caching and by design, ESXi leaves caching to the HBA's. All this to mean that the M1015 under an ESXi VM using ZFS is a recipe for horrible write performance (we're talking 13-20MB/s with no compression and no deduplication). If I boot debian from a LiveCD and import my ZFS pool, my writes go up to 50/60-100+MB/s with the drives still connected to the M1015. So I know it's related to the ESXi caching.
I've looked at a few other cards (specifically the M5014/5015/5016), but these don't do JBOD/Passthrough (most posts tell people to go grab the M1015).
What options are available out there? I'm hoping there's something that has some cache, supports write-back on the hardware itself, allows me to do JBOD/Passthrough and works in ESXi. I know that may be asking a lot - hoping experts here can chime in.
Cheers,