A vFiler is not a hypervisor (more of a container) so the workload is very similar to running in vFiler0. The same volumes in 10 vFilers or 1 vFiler would have the same performance impact on the system. The overhead for the vFiler is about 400k of memory so very little overhead. vFiler root really holds the configuration information and most logging goes back to vfiler0 root. I would create the vFiler root volume at least 10GB so it meets data motion requirements and to hold any logging (if mirroring/vaulting or cifs auditing within the vfiler for example).
-----Original Message----- From: toasters-bounces@teaparty.net [mailto:toasters-bounces@teaparty.net] On Behalf Of Randy Rue Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 2:18 PM To: toasters@teaparty.net Subject: vfiler root IO and performance across aggregates?
Hello All,
We're about to spin up a new 3240 active/passive HA pair with a few hundred SATA disks divided into five aggregates for best RAID distribution and overall IOps. We'll be serving up NFS data from a dozen or two volumes, divided across the aggregates for roughly even capacity and IO load.
For clarity of management and to ease any possible portability issues later I like the idea of running all of this under a vfiler. Got a few questions first, however.
Do I create any CPU/RAM bottleneck by putting all of this under one vfiler? For example, would I be forcing otherwise multi-threaded processes onto one CPU? (Oh, we're running 8.0.2P5 in 7-mode, BTW)
I have to put the root volume for that vfiler on one of those aggregates. Will heavy processing traffic cause heavier disk IO to the aggregate housing the root? Or is the vfiler root held in RAM? Seems like it could be and would be a good idea to do it that way. In either case, seems like it would make sense to put the vfiler root on aggr0, which uses up three disks to create 1.25TB and otherwise only contains the physical filer's root.
Any other considerations I should know about?
Hope to hear from you,
Randy
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