Guessing that it sped up access due to the bug (and/or regular performance degradation from hitting the same blocks multiple times due to de-dupe)?

With some of the dedupe improvements rumored in 7.3, I’d expect that to potentially improve.

From: Darren Sykes [mailto:Darren.Sykes@csr.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 9:45 AM
To: Glenn Walker; Page, Jeremy; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: Snapvault slow on one specific volume?

SMotion - you'd hope (without breaking any NDA's) that they would address that in the next version, and possibly give you the option to specify thin or fat disks explicitly.

Out of interest - I removed dedup on our templates volume and a VM provisioning job that took 16 mins yesterday took less than 5 mins today.

Darren.

From: Glenn Walker [mailto:ggwalker@mindspring.com]
Sent: 14 October 2008 13:43
To: Darren Sykes; Page, Jeremy; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: Snapvault slow on one specific volume?

FC and iSCSI does mean FAT VMDK, unless you create them manually and specify thin provisioned (not typical). The Storage VMotion info is good to know – I hope they get that fixed soon.

Thanks for the additional info – it’s something for us to watch out for. We went NFS from the start (and performed P2V and V2V into the NFS-based datastores), but I know that SVMotion has been used and templates as well. I’ll try to check our use of templates a bit later today…

Glenn

From: Darren Sykes [mailto:Darren.Sykes@csr.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 3:00 AM
To: Glenn Walker; Page, Jeremy; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: Snapvault slow on one specific volume?

Glenn,

That's true; by default all new VM's created on an NFS volume would be thin provisioned. I'm not sure if that's the case for templates though (I thought they were created fat on purpose for performance reasons when deploying them).

Also, we migrated from FC and iSCSI LUNS (which is basically a file copy) so most of our VM's are fat anyway. From what I understand using SVMOTION also results in a fat filed VM, though that's not officially supported on NFS in ESX3.5.

So, in summary there are a few reasons why you might end up with non-thin provisioned VM's on NFS and may therefore hit this bug.

Darren

From: Glenn Walker [mailto:ggwalker@mindspring.com]
Sent: Tue 10/14/2008 03:23
To: Darren Sykes; Page, Jeremy; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: Snapvault slow on one specific volume?

I was under the impression that ESX over NFS used thin-provisioned VMDKs by default (that’s how it is in our environment, and all of the files are appearing as thin-provisioned). Would this then be not the same bug? Thin-provisioned VMDKs means that the portion of the VMDK not allocated to the guest would be treated as a sparse file, not a file filled with zeros. (unless someone decided to perform a full format on the ‘disk’, perhaps?)

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Darren Sykes
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 3:51 PM
To: Page, Jeremy; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: Snapvault slow on one specific volume?

Jeremy/All,

Following on from our conversation offline:

It would seem you (and I) have been suffering from the bug described here: http://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/bol?Type=Detail&Display=281669

We saw it on template volumes. I'm planning to disable ASIS on that volume to attempt to speed up access.

Obviously, that solution may be less than useful in your environment where it's live data volumes which benefit from ASIS.

Darren

size=2 width="100%" align=center tabIndex=-1>

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of Page, Jeremy
Sent: Mon 10/13/2008 13:14
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Snapvault slow on one specific volume?

I have an aggr with two volumes on it. One of them is a 3.5 TB CIFS/NFS share that is reasonably fast to snapvault and a 1 TB NFS share (ESX VMs) that is exceptionally slow. As in it’s been doing it’s initial copy for over a week and still has not finished. NDMP backups of this volume are also quite slow, does anyone know why it would be so much slower then the other volume using the same spindles? The filer is not under extreme load, although occasionally it’s pretty busy. Here is a “normal” sysstat:

CPU Total Net kB/s Disk kB/s Tape kB/s Cache Cache CP CP Disk

ops/s in out read write read write age hit time ty util

12% 1007 2970 8996 15769 9117 0 0 8 93% 49% : 41%

18% 920 2792 6510 11715 6924 0 0 8 99% 84% T 39%

15% 1276 3580 10469 15942 8041 0 0 10 92% 33% T 36%

13% 1487 3416 11347 15632 4907 0 0 11 89% 42% : 43%

17% 1417 3180 9890 14000 9444 0 0 9 98% 79% T 41%

13% 972 3704 9705 15427 9934 0 0 7 92% 46% T 51%

18% 1087 2947 11911 17717 4640 0 0 9 98% 33% T 47%

11% 1204 3358 11219 14090 5159 0 0 7 88% 100% : 50%

12% 1161 2808 9085 12640 5936 0 0 9 90% 33% T 44%

13% 981 4735 11919 16125 7097 0 0 9 92% 45% : 43%

15% 1158 5780 12480 17565 8266 0 0 10 92% 88% T 41%

I’m just having difficulty trying to determine why two volumes on the same spindles would be so different in the time it takes to do their initial transfer. Also, the VM’s do not seem slower then those hosted on other aggregates (this one is 3 RG of 11 disks each, Ontap 7.2.4 on a 3070A IBM rebranded).

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