Benchmarks–ESXI running off Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L SAN

April 18th, 2011

Did some benchmarking with ESXI running off a SAN on an old Gigabyte motherboard… through ISCSI…

Really bad performance.

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Why?

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Bonnie on the mirrored arrays shows output of up to 110k Read, 77k Writes.  Dun seem to be a Hard Disk Problem… as it looks pretty comparable to my system that runs on Nexenta with speeds at:

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Installing Nexenta and Importing mpool to run bonnie

Now.. this is really weird. for some reasons… when I reimport the pool… the performance really sucks.  Maybe OpenSolaris zpools are not entirely compatible to the Nexenta ones?

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Tried recreating new pools… still sucks…

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Seems like the Nexenta implementation is not really good for systems with low resources.  During the runs, CPU was constantly high at over 80%.

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Exploring Communique CQ

April 17th, 2011

Well, kind of rounding up my playing with SAN and ZFS until my new hardware arrives from the States.

First thing I did was to download the CRX jar file.  From there I kind of got to the Web UI for the CRX repository.

First Steps

Screencast to get started

http://dev.day.com/ddc/blog/2008/04/firststeps1/docroot/firststeps1.html

Objectives to achieve

a.  Posting to a JCR Path, i.e. /content/firststeps

b.  Reading with Sling

c.  Posting with a * (implies item list)

d. Special input properties, i.e. created, createdBy, lastModified, lastModifiedBy

e.  Accessing a collection of nodes

f.  Listing through javascript template, jst file.

Well couldn’t quite get point f to work… but anyhows.. here are some simple html files to save the next guy from typing all over again…  Sad smile  they should have provided for a file download link for the source…

http://james.com.sg/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/FirstSteps.zip

After typing in all the example… then I realise that FirstSteps is kind of installed with CRX and is available at:

http://localhost:7402/apps/firststeps/0_hello.html

Sigh.. Sad smile

CQ WebDAV URL

http://localhost:7402/crx/repository/crx.default

 

Avenues of working with CRX

Screencast:

http://www.day.com/day/en/products/crx.html

Avenues of Working

Products checkout is over 6Mb.  Will have to stare at the blank screen for a long time as there is no ajax status message.

Interesting to note that… the labelling of all the product attributes is through a xml file at the root of the subversion tree, i.e.

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Different Renditions

CRX allows different renditions to be hooked to the content type, i.e.

  • Txt, View  – By Default
  • Html – Needs to point to a sling:resourceType

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Packaging

Allows selective packaging of both content and application codes into an easily deployable zip file.

Sample Application Blog

http://dev.day.com/content/docs/en/crx/current/developing/developers_getting_started.html

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TED–Interesting Talks

April 17th, 2011

Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

Marcin Jakubowski

Project: Global Village Construction Set

http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html

Nice Quote: Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear, so complete, that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit

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Resources of ZFS Backup

April 17th, 2011

Some useful links on ZFS Backup.

http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_backup

http://www.markround.com/archives/38-ZFS-Replication.html

Send and Recv Backup Commands

Creating a snapshot

zfs snapshot –r mpool@bk1

Replicating an entire pool

zfs send –R mpool@bk1 | zfs receive –F –dvu dpool

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ISCSI with ZFS–Through ComStar

April 15th, 2011

Very relevant and interesting PDF slides..

http://wikis.sun.com/download/attachments/102400619/S304013_OpenStorage_ZFS_COMSTAR.pdf

Relevant Video

Comstar Prerequisites

http://wikis.sun.com/display/OpenSolarisInfo200906/COMSTAR+Prerequisites

Alternative Links to ISCSI

Nexenta and Comstar

http://www.nexenta.org/projects/site/wiki/SettingISCSI

http://support.nexenta.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=132&nav=0,12

Well based on those resources, I was able to configure my open solaris to share ISCSI just like how Nexenta has done it.  Hmm… so my suspicion is confirmed.  Nexenta Community is bascially a snazzy frontend over all the solaris terminal commands…

Napp-It (GUI to ISCSI Tgt)

http://www.napp-it.org/

Installation Command:

wget -O – www.napp-it.org/nappit | perl

Addendum: Even Linux seems to have iSCSI…

ISCSI Intro in Linux

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ESXI – Performance of Thin vs Thick

April 15th, 2011

imageHmmm.. apparently I have been erring on the kiasu side.  I have always went with thick provisioning with the concept that storage is cheap … and that I should always go for the performance.

Apparently, thick and thin provisioning has little impact on performance.  It is only the eager-thick provisioning that has some impact for the first time writes.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_thinprov_perf.pdf

If only I had known earlier… I would have gone thin… all the way…

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ZFS – Newbie (No Such Device in /dev/dsk)

April 14th, 2011

If you are a newbie like me and am playing with ZFS.  One of the problems u might encounter is having absolutely no idea how to start.  In linux, we know the SATA drives are all in /dev and they are like:

sda, sdb, sdc, …

However in solaris, you see a whole lot of stuff in /dev/dsk.  How do we know which ones are the drives that we can add to the zpool and starting playing with our beloved ZFS?

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If you are like a newbie like me, you will probably find the above listing of devices cryptic.  I mean.. out of the hundreds… which are harddisks?

So when you try out one by one, you will get errors like:

cannot open ‘c7t1d0d0’: no such device in /dev/dsk

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Hmm.. so how do we go about finding out about what kind of hard drives there are?  The trick is in the format command.

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A format command as you can see will very quickly isolate for you all your drive names.  As you can see, c7t0d0, c7t2d0, c7t3d0 are just some of my drives.

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OpenSolaris – ZFS

April 14th, 2011

For the past few days, I have been taking it easy.  Using Nexenta as a platform for deploying ZFS.  Hmm.. but from what I understand, Nexenta is just a nice GUI on top of OpenSolaris…. so why not go for the real thing?

Next Mission:  Set up an OpenSolaris system to function much like my Nexenta SAN with an ISCSI interface!

2011-04-14_17-38-14_461_Singapore

Installation of Open Solaris

2011-04-14_17-38-26_842_Singapore

My Redundant Array of Hard Drives

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ESXI 4.1 – Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L

April 14th, 2011

Tried installing on an old motherboard of mine… Seems like it has no problems…  all we need is the good old Intel Pro1000 GT NIC.

2011-04-14_11-27-00_848_Singapore 2011-04-14_11-27-56_206_Singapore
2011-04-14_13-27-57_636_Singapore 2011-04-14_13-14-10_845_Singapore
2011-04-14_11-27-33_807_Singapore  

Strange thing is…  even the Intel CPU E5200 works.

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But if you were to check up on the CPU,

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=37212

You will find that it has none of the VT technology.  Always thought we needed those to run ESXI

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Ah… so this is the difference.  When I tried installing a 64 bit application, I hit this warning message.  Apparently VMWare can run 32 bit VMs without VT .. but not so for 64 bit VMs.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/197291

Anyhow, stubborn me continued to try installing Ubuntu (64-bit) on it through my SAN (from Nexenta)… and seems to be doing just fine…

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Same kind of performance I get for my other Load Test based on just 1 cable of I Gbps network cable.

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ESXI–ISCSI Round Robin Configuration

April 14th, 2011

Well, if you think you are getting good performance just by setting up your ISCSI initiators to point to the right VMKernels with multiple NICs in ESXI, you are mistaken.

Apparently, the default IOPS for LUNS in VMWare is set to 1000.  (This controls how many IOS are sent down a given path before vSphere starts to route it down another path).

So the recommended best practise is to set it to 1 for every LUN.

Script:

for i in `ls /vmfs/devices/disks/ | grep naa.600` ; 
do esxcli nmp roundrobin setconfig --type "iops" --iops=1 --device $i ;done

Compliments from:

http://www.ivobeerens.nl/?p=465

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