hey guys--

There are 2 Dell PE's that are in my group and i was hoping to get a little info. Machine 1 is a PE 2650 w/RAID 5. Machine 2 is a PE 2950 w/RAID 5

i built the first machine quite a while back (2/3 years ago), and, like then, i'm not a hardware expert and wouldn't be able to speak too much as to how i built it (RAID 5 with defaults :) the second was build by someone else in my company. both are acting as VMWare servers (Windows 2003).

my question is, when i do 'properties' of a drive and look at the hardware tab, the first machine says "Dell Container SCSI Disk Drive". Machine 2 says "Dell PERC 5/i SCSI Disk Drive". what exactly is the difference between the 2 when thinking of performance?

the reason i ask is, when i power down vm's being hosted on Machine 1 (PERC not listed in the description, though i do believe i see PERC in the text when the machine is booting), they behave as i would expect, and power down fairly fast. but on Machine 2, vm's take FOREVER (up to 16 minutes) to power down. and the whole time the vm hard disk icon is lit up as if it's doing a ton of writing (or maybe just a little writing extremely slowly).

vm's on both servers perform fine while powered up, it's just during shutdown that i notice the disparity. that's when i started comparing things on the 2 servers and noticed the disk detail difference i've pointed out. now there are some other differences (Machine 1 is 32-bit 2003 while Machine 2 is 64-bit 20003), but since it seems to be disk activiy upon shutdown that is the problem, i'm wondering if the difference in the way the containers were set up was the main issue. both have plenty of hard drive space available, large page files, and physical memory to spare.

ANY advice and/or info is very much appreciated.

THANKS.

Message Edited by cpwrtic on 06-15-2007 10:15 AM

Message Edited by cpwrtic on 06-15-2007 10:38 AM