I’ve not been pleased with performance…Disk io is definitely the bottleneck. The %wa or io wait in top is always high when the system is sluggish, slow. Of course, I’m usually doing a lot of disk io so it is not expected. But I did find the following site that talks about performance on the Perc controller
http://thias.marmotte.net/archives/2008/01/05/Dell-PERC5E-and-MD1000-performance-tweaks.html
ran
blockdev --getra /dev/sda
and received 256
ran
blockdev --setra 8192 /dev/sda
Initial tests of suspending/resuming vms and copying show significant improvement.
Added the line
/sbin/blockdev --setra 8192 /dev/sda
in /etc/rc.local
