[THIN] Re: Citrix - Harddisk Specification

Dear Toby,

 

Working for a hardware vendor I would certainly say it will increase performance....

 

However: To what extend ? Before investing in the material and work, I would spend some time in getting some windows performance data from perfmon/perflogs.

If the disksubsystem is really your problem/bottleneck (eg avg diskqueueLength, %disktime, Avg Disk Sec / Transfer)

Try to figure out too if you have enough memory, since this could increase paging activity. Check the % your page file is in use lets say

1         hour after the start of the day for your office users, that would probably give the highest load in terms of userlogons on your farm.

Then if its clear that bad performance is due to your disksubsystem, spend some money and split indeed the pagefile from your OS/applications.

Worth consideration is also to consider another stripe size on your hardware controller and/or NTFS format level. IF the average io block size is gathered

around 16KB for your applications then an clustersize (NTFS blocksize) of 4KB might not be optimal. Consider formatting your volumes with the adequate stripe size.

Also I discourage using software Raid (striped volumes in Windows).

 

Of course disks with 15krpm are quicker in seeking data… then 10krpm disks are. But I would figure it to be a very modest increase in speed. I consider that

Splitting of a heavily paged servers would make a bigger difference but I’m afraid only a modest increase.

 

Generally speaking though, I do not think there is a real good chance your problems will be eradicated just by going for this option (using Acronis or ghost or alike tools)

To get the job hasslefree done.

 

I’ve only seen that Database servers are benefitting of reorganising data, logs, pagefile , to separate disks or opting for other cluster/stripe sizes

never seen any other system taking real advantage of it apart from these type of servers.

If it’s a clear case of a diskbottleneck then ok but don’t expect any miracles neither.

RAID 5 performs well if the % reading is above 2/3 of times. RAID 5 performs even better the more disks you have too (So Raid 5 with 4 disks is better off then

Raid 5 with 3 disks)

 

Regards,

 

 

Stefan Timmermans

 

 

 

 

 

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From: thin-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Toby
Sent: vrijdag 19 december 2008 11:08
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] Citrix - Harddisk Specification

 

Hi List,

Would there be a noticeable performance increase if we purchased 4 x 72gb SAS 15k disks, RAID 1 for the OS, with a page file on each of the other two disks, or 3 x 146gb SAS 10k disk, RAID 1 for the OS, and a single disk for a single page file?

Two questions really;
Would you recommend 72gb 15 k or 146gb 10k?
Two page files per Citrix server with two physical disks or 1 page file with one physical disk?

Many thanks,
Toby