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At first I was really happy with my new HP ProLiant DL380 G6 because it is a really nice machine.  This machine was going to be an ESX-server so I added a few disks, a second CPU and plenty of memory, new specifications:

• CPU(s): 2x Intel Xeon Quad E5520 (2.27GHz)
• Memory: 28GB (2x 2GB, 6x 4GB) DDR3
• Disk(s): 2x 36GB, 3x 300GB

Enough to make the machine running really fast, you would think. Once I had installed ESXi 3.5 U4 on the machine I started to install the environment consisting of a 4 Windows-servers and 5 client-systems (XP and Vista).

While installing I noticed that the machine appeared to be really slow when it comes to Disk I/O: During the installation of two 2008-Servers the extraction process of the disk image took over an hour (I installed both 2008 servers simultaneously, which normally would be no problem at all). When finished installing I saw the “Disk Performance” statistics (in the vSphere Client) peaking no higher than 7-8MB/s which was really frustrating. The esx-top utility on the command-line of the ESX-server gave the exact same results.

After some searching Arne Fokkema sent me a link where some people had similar problems on the VMware Communities and there was one response with someone who solved it by upgrading the firmware of the DL380’s Smart Array P410i Controller to version 2.00, and also by adding the Battery Pack for Smart Array to enable the Posted-Write Cache.

So here are the steps to take to solve this issue:

• Order the Battery Pack for Smart Array P212/P410/P411 (P/N: 462969-B21). Since ordering this can take some time it’s the smartest thing to do first
• Upgrade your Smart Array P410i Controller’s firmware to version 2.00. Which is not really easy of you’re not used to doing such. You can do this by:
  • Downloading the latest HP ProLiant Firmware CD – which is version 8.60 at this moment and can be found here: http://bit.ly/1Luqts
  • Download the Smart Array P410i v2.00 Firmware (both the CP011340.scexe and CP011340.md5 file) which can be found here: http://bit.ly/mDiqE
  • Open the Firmware 8.60 ISO-file with your ISO-editor (PowerISO for example) and add the two files of the Smart Array firmware update and add them to the compaq\swpackages directory and save the ISO-file.
  • Burn or mount the ISO through ILO on your server and boot from it and make it run all the Firmware-updates and it will automatically say it wants to update the Smart Array controller firmware to version 2.00, and this is what you need to do
• Furthermore, after receiving your Batttery Pack order, place it in the server and connect it to the memory of the Smart Array controller. If you don’t know how: consult the ProLiant DL380 G6 Manuals.

NOTE: The usage of the ‘altered’ HP ProLiant Firmware CD is necessary because normally you can run Firmware update like these from the server’s commandline or within Windows using the HP Smart Update tool. But ESXi 3.5 U4 lacks some commandline tools to do this.

After doing all of this you will still have to wait a few hours for the Battery Pack is fully charged, because the Posted-Write Cache will not work until then. After this your server will run on steroids and will reach up-to and above 70MB/s.

I hope I have saved you all lots of trouble finding the cause of the lack of disk performance on your brand-new server