topic Re: VSA Performance in StoreVirtual Storage

VSA Performance

lax617 — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:13:25 GMT

Hello,

Can someone explain what effect this setting in the CMC (ver 8.1) has on storage performance? I have been running performance tests using IO meter, but moving the slider does not seem to have much effect in the numbers I am seeing.

Thanks.

Re: VSA Performance

teledata — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:25:47 GMT

This determines how much bandwidth priority you give to internal cluster traffic (like replication and restriping).

Increasing this allows internal cluster restripes to complete faster, but could degrade the performance of your iSCSI volume traffic. If you are doing maintenance during a down time you can crank this up to allow it to complete faster, but be sure you drop it back down when you are done and before you start having significant iSCSI traffic to your volumes.

I think in version 8.5 the default is 16MB/s instead of 4 MB/s

Re: VSA Performance

lax617 — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 17:36:27 GMT

Thanks teledata. Are there any other parameters or settings to tinker with in order to improve performance? I followed the guidelines in the VSA user's manual and have tried tinkering with settings in vCenter, but based on IOmeter testing and ESX related operations I have not seen much of a difference.

I have combed these forums and google looking for other settings to play with, but I haven't come up with anything that provides a noticeable improvement.

Re: VSA Performance

Reginald Swensen — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 12:55:37 GMT

The greatest performance improvement I got was when I moved my VSAs to VMWare ESXi 4.1. I'm running them on HP DL180V6 machines and performance looks almost the same as my older NSM2120G2 (roughly equiv to P4300) units. Of course I am running SANIQ 8.5.

Re: VSA Performance

teledata — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 14:07:20 GMT

Of course the other performance increase is simply optimization of the underlying hardware RAID supporting it.

There is not much tweaking that can be done to the VSA, since it is a software virtualized RAID 0 stripe with limited network options (same as with disk, you best option for improving performance and/or failover is via the virtual network stack)