Hi,
I have a Windows 2003 Failover cluster for file sharing. It consists of two nodes and is connected to a fiber channel SCSI array.
We are planning to migrate it to a Windows 2012 R2 cluster, with another fiber channel SCSI array, twice as much faster than the other.
The 2003 cluster resides in two phisical servers. The Windows 2012 is to be mounted on a VMWARE 5.1 cluster.
I have installed both nodes, each one in a different server. The Disks are presented to virtual machines as RAW disks, following the VMWare guides to MSCS cluster.
I have set up the cluster. And I have found the following surprising things:
If I copy a big file (Gigabytes), from one of the cluster disks to other cluster disk, locally (i.e copy f:\test.zip g:) I get rates of transfer no more than 12 MB/s. If I do the same in the phisical windows 2003 cluster, I get similar rates.
If I copy from other server, to a disc of the cluster (I log on to a server, and, from a folder, I copy a big file to the \\cluster\resource, I get rates of up to 70 MB/s.
If I log onto the cluster (node which handles the resource), and copy the file from \\serversource\f$\test.zip to g: cluster drive, I get rates of up to 112 MB/s.
When I copy the file to the 2003 cluster, I get rates about 30 MB/s, which is coherent with the slower disk array.
Which I am surprised about, is about the terrific slow rate of 12 MB/s between disks into the same node, I mean, a local copy. I think it should be considerabily faster than a copy through network.
Is it normal or there is something wrong that I have to solve?
Thanks