Zentyal/Ebox, slowness, and WDxxEARS Advanced Format

• Zentyal (formerly named Ebox) is an Ubuntu based Small business server that is easy to configure and in my opnion a real breakthrough in Ubuntu-based small business servers. Unfortunately, I had a bit of bad luck (or lack of information) when I installed my first two servers for clients on Curaçao. The server was very, very slow, up to the point where a simple ssh login took 2 minutes and in one case the install halted halfway. I spent many hours trying to troubleshoot the problem and meanwhile I had to revert to webmin or some other solution.


• The problems are described in the following posts on the Zimbra forum:
  http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=3697.0
  http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=4212.0
  http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=3968.0
  http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=3427.0
  http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=4273.0
  and most notably
  http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=5724.0


• Unfortunately, the forums didn't help much. After many days of frustration, I decided to buy support, which cost 390 EUR. I've never paid for support before in my life and I hope I don't have to do it again. Although the team at Zentyal did their best to help me, they didn't really succeed. Finally, after swapping out all hardware except the harddisks, I bought a new harddisk, although there where no harddisk errors reported and SMART status was okay.


• Then it hit me like a brick. I typed in the model number of my Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EARS and what do you think - hundreds of posts about how this harddisk uses Advanced Format and how that gives loads of problems. Google for yourself: any WD of the EARS series has this problem. My new disks where of the EADS series and after copying all the data (which took ages) and reinstalling the server, the server was flying! Normal load, normal speed, everything was fine.


• The problem lies in the alignment of sectors on the EARS drive. More information on the Advanced Format can be found here and here.


• After I repartitioned the EARS drives by hand, I installed a new server with these disks, and the server was as fast as it should be. Wrong alignment of the EARS drives really really slows all disk I/O down.


• Newer versions of parted should detect AF automatically and so I hope the Zentyal team will put the newer version of parted into their installer. Also, when giving support, a simple
  
  
  hdparm -i /dev/sd?|grep EARS
  
  
  would make the problem clear right away. A pity that the team at Zentyal didn't know that and I hope this information will be integrated in their knowledgebase.


• All in all, I find Zentyal a great product that really fills a niche in the small business server market. I am happy with the server now that the slowness problems have been solved.