toasters April 2012

toasters@lists.teaparty.net

37 participants
23 discussions

Do I need a flexclone license?
by Milazzo Giacomo 05 Apr '12

05 Apr '12

Hi all, I ask this to field for I'm receiving not always clear answers. The environment is this: Oracle RAC and ASM with backups managed by SMO in SAN FC storage. If I would mount a snap to have a rewritable image do I need the FlexClone license too? If I would clone a snap do I need FlexClone? Regards

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fpolicy overhead
by Kennedy, Jeffrey 05 Apr '12

05 Apr '12

Does anyone know what the overhead of fpolicy translates into? Specifically I'm looking at NTP QFS for external quota management (no file blocking). Right now I can't test under load, just functional (minimal lab environment) but I'd like some idea of overhead before going too far down the path. For instance, if having fpolicy enabled for such a function will add 20%, I may as well stop now. But if it's 2% then everything's rosy. As an aside, I'm also looking at the security audit and reporting product from Likewise, now EMC-Isilon. It also uses fpolicy and cifs auditing. I do not yet have this in the lab but any input on this would also be appreciated. Thanks. Jeff Kennedy Qualcomm, Incorporated QCT Engineering Compute 858-651-6592

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V-series / WAFL performance / 20% free
by Stuart Kendrick 04 Apr '12

04 Apr '12

Hi folks, I'm familiar with the NetApp recommendation to keep ~20% free on all volumes ... this allows WAFL to maximize its performance (convert random IO to streaming IO ... i.e. the 'Write Anywhere ...' part of WAFL). But I'm skeptical that this recommendation applies to V-Series installations, i.e. situations in which the backend array was built by someone other than NetApp. Seems to me that with V-Series, WAFL may find what it thinks are 128K of contiguous blocks on storage and perform the WRITE ... but ... since the backend array has virtualized the blocks in some fashion, opaque to ONTAP, there is no knowing what really happens. In other words, the blocks which ONTAP specifies do /not/ map to physical blocks ... once the WRITE arrives at the array, the backend will do whatever it thinks best with them, perhaps perform a streaming write to contiguous blocks, perhaps not. Implementation-specific. -In fact, with a V-Series, I would imagine (I have a rich imagination) that ONTAP doesn't bother to even try to convert random IO into streaming IO -- I would imagine that it just hands the blocks to the backend in a jumble and says "Do whatever". So, I would like to claim that with V-Series, I can fill up my volumes without impacting write performance ... or, more precisely, that impact is dependent on the characteristics of the backend ... perhaps the backend needs free space in order to optimize its write performance, perhaps it does not. [In our particular case, we're using 3Par, and 'fullness' would not impact performance.] Would anyone see holes in my thinking? --sk Stuart Kendrick FHCRC

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toasters April 2012