On 6/19/06, Tim Allen <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As I noted in another thread, the HBA is an Emulex LP1050, and they have a rather old driver for it. I've recommended that they update ASAP. This hasn't happened yet.
Yeah, I saw that in a later thread. I would suggest also that the BIOS settings on the HBA itself have been investigated. An example is the Qlogic HBAs have a profile of sorts, one for tape and one for disk. Could be something there.
OK, thanks, I'll ask the customer whether they've used PowerPath at all. They do seem to have it installed on the machine, but I suppose that doesn't guarantee it's being used correctly. However, it looks like they have just the one HBA, so, if I've correctly understood what load balancing means in this context, it's not going to help; right?
If they have a single HBA then no it won't help. I'm not very intimate on powerpath but it might even HURT if they have it enabled with one HBA. As an example, we were in the process of migrating an AIX LPAR to our DS6800. We only had one spare HBA to assign it. The default policy with the SDD driver is lb (load balancing). The problem is that with the SDD driver you see multiple hdisks per HBA per controller port on the SAN. Since we had 4 controller ports active on the SAN, our HBA saw 4 hdisks per LUN. The SDD driver abstracts that out as a single vpath and you use the vpaths as your pv on the system. The problem was that it was attempting to load balance across a single hba which was NOT what we wanted.
I've done some dd'ing myself, as described in another thread. The results are not at all encouraging - their SAN seems to do about 20MB/s or less.
I saw that as well.
The SAN possibly is over-subscribed. Can you suggest any easy ways for me to find out? The customer has an IT department who look after their SANs, and they're not keen on outsiders poking their noses in. It's hard for me to get any direct access to the SAN itself.
When I say over-subscribed, you have to look at all the active LUNs and all of the systems attached as well. With the DS4300 (standard not turbo option), the SAN can handle 512 I/Os per second. If I have 4 LUNs assigned to four systems (1 per system), and each LUN has a queue_depth of 128 from each system, I''ll oversubscribe with the next host attach unless I back the queue_depth off on each host. Contrast that with the Turbo controller option which does 1024 I/Os per sec and I can duplicate what I have now or add a second LUN per host. I can't even find how much our DS6800 supports.
Thanks for all the suggestions, John. I'll keep trying to follow some of them up.
