Some ODX Fun With Windows Server 2012 R2 And A Dell Compellent SAN

I’m playing and examining some of the ODX capabilities of our SANs (Dell, Compellent) at the moment. It all seems pretty impressive in the demo’s. But how does that behave in real live on our gear? How impressive is ODX? Well pretty darn impressive actually. And as all great power it needs to be wielded carefully, with insight and thought.

Let’s create some fixed virtual disks. 10 * 50GB vhdx and 10* 475GB vhdx. We run a simple quick PowerShell script:

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You see this correctly, it’s 41.5088855 seconds. let’s round up to 42 seconds. That’s 20 fixed VHDX files. 10 of 50GB, 10 of 475GB in 42 seconds. That’s a total of 5.12TB of vhdx files.

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Compared to creating a single 5TB vhdx file this isn’t to shabby as that get done in 26 seconds!

You can only dream of the kind of scenario’s this kind of power enables. Woooot!!!

12 thoughts on “Some ODX Fun With Windows Server 2012 R2 And A Dell Compellent SAN

  1. Hi,
    I like your blogs.
    About this script, are commands synchronus or non synchronus ? In other words, are vhdx created simultaneously or a disk is not created until the previous is ended. Performances are fabulous with odx, but I think that if you disable odx, and re-run the script, you will get excellent comparison results.

  2. Wow, that is really impressive. Would ODX offer performance improvements when doing other things like expanding and shrinking VHDX files?

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  8. One question regarding the test scenario. There was Compellent storage and I expect one client connected to the storage. Did you try the scenario with more like 2 servers connected to storage ?
    ODX works ?

    • ODX works regardless of the number of servers. This was actually one node in a test Hyper-V cluster. We also did other tests to see the speed difference when leveraging ODX with CSV versus a “classic” clusterd disk. Other testing involves backups, snapshots etc & heavy IO on the LIN were ODX is being leveraged.

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