Hey Storage Spaces Direct Fans,

Today I deployed a 2x Node Storage Spaces Direct configuration for a customer. They purchased 2 x HP DL380 G9’s, P840 Controllers (HBA’s), 256GB RAM, 6 x Intel 1.6 TB SSD, Mellanox CX-3 Pro network adapters, and connected to their existing Cisco Meraki Switches.

Now, if you remember from an earlier blog post I was talking about the issues with Cisco Meraki not being able to support RDMA (RoCE) traffic in this current release. As a result this customer decided to use a non-RDMA configuration. Here are some of the results from our stress testing with VMFleet today. We hit over 500k IOPS although not shown directly in this screen shot. I didn’t catch the high water mark.

Anyways felt it would be fun to share this with you.

The biggest difference between using a non-RDMA configuration and an RDMA Configuration is the pressure on the Network Adapters, Switches, and the CPU utilization during rebuilds.

This configuration was for a smaller law firm that only had a handful of Virtual Machines anyways so they were very happy with this performance. Especially knowing that in the future if we get Switches that support RDMA they will get even better performance and better VM density.

Thanks and happy learning,

Dave