To summerize in terms of IOPS:

RAID10

Read: I/O will be produced from 7 spindles only. (ie, there are RAID1 disks x 7)
Write: I/O will be written to 7 spindles only, but replicated across the mirror disk in the same time (no overhead).

RAID50

Read: I/O will be produced from all 14 spindles. (ie, there are RAID5 disks x 2)
Write: I/O will be written to all 14 spindles, so there are overhead in each RAID5 group which consists of 7 spindles each plus parity calculation.

So I would still think RAID10 is faster in Write only by at least 40-50% (this is proved in the new SANHQ 2.2 RAID Evaluator feature), but RAID50 should be faster in terms of Read, but due to overhead plus parity, it’s almost the same as RAID10.

Btw, you are the 2nd guy (1st guy is Andy) I know who uses EQL in Hong Kong, my Dell sales told me they have sold over 100 units in HK last year which I seriously doubt it’s true. My 6th sense told me there are actually only a small group of people using EQL in Hong Kong, probably less than 50 units in total.

Anyway, it would be nice if we can form a small local EQL User Group and get together sometime and share things we are crazy about. I mean EQL, VMWare, Windows, Netscreen, Email Server, IOPS, SQL Server, IDS, Monitoring tools, basically how to make a system admin life much easier are all welcome, of course, if you love model cars or tennis will be even better.

There is a feature call Experimental Analysis which can monitor IO utilization.

Also, since version 2.2, the RAID Evaluator also help to compare different RAID type.

The Max IOPS is depends on how client access.

Also, did you try disable logging of guest ?