Sun 7110 disk and network load

[cookie_monster]

Does my 7110 look busy to you guys? I'm just trying to get a feel for what figures I should look out for to let me know when it's under heavy load. I can see on the image below that some of the blue bars show quite high but I never see more than the cloud symbol. Some of the grey bars go all the way to the top what's the difference between the blue and grey meter bars?

 

Thanks.

 

http://tbgrfq.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p9-OhcM8nSVXGj2SSNF_C9ZgZ7nTiqSxktTYgoLPZBRrsWoS67d-wxZfAqD_4fP9yZ1XLfR1wyHjkUsj3olRWOrEnbkLvohrM/7110.jpg

[Soulfish]

I believe grey is the highest recorded figure and blue is the average

[Soulfish]

And to give you an idea of load this is our 7110 running a load of VMs/Home Directories/Whatever else we can throw at it

[cookie_monster]

Thought that might be the difference our disks look quite busy but it seems to be coping. Then again your look like they've been flat out at some point.

[Soulfish]

Thought that might be the difference our disks look quite busy but it seems to be coping. Then again your look like they've been flat out at some point.

 

It's certainly being kept busy that's for sure!

[Butuz]

As far as I understand - cloud symbol is not really megabusy it just means it is being used a bit. Are you running a database on there as you have quite high iops compared to your network usage?

 

Here is mine

 

 

Cheers

 

Butuz

Edited February 4, 2010 by Butuz

[linescanner]

Andrew,

 

does not look under real pressure. I have had some at hurricane force

[cookie_monster]

As far as I understand - cloud symbol is not really megabusy it just means it is being used a bit. Are you running a database on there as you have quite high iops compared to your network usage?

 

Here is mine

 

 

Cheers

 

Butuz

 

 

 

 

We have 6 VM's running on there so all of the VHD's are on the SAN, 2x file servers 2x DC's, a print server also running WSUS (that uses SQL but it's not very heavy) and a Citrix box.

 

I was exporting a VM when that screen shot was taken so it might be under more load than normal.

[cookie_monster]

Andrew,

 

does not look under real pressure. I have had some at hurricane force

 

 

 

It seems to be coping very well, they're impressive units

[Butuz]

Yep they are amazing units.

 

Currently I am running 3 x VM's on mine over NFS3 on a single Gigabit link. One terminal server serving 36 thin clients, and 2 low use web servers serving our sharepoint intranet, helpdesk and other random web based software. As linescanner says it is not even being tickled.

 

Will soon be adding another Temrinal Server, a SIMS server, and a couple more low use web servers onto there.

 

Over the next couple of months I hope to upgrade it with port trunking etc to give 3 (hopefully 4) gig links for each SAN and 2 (hopefully 3) gig links to each ESXi server.

 

I am sooooo glad i went a totally different way to everyone else around here and gave Sun a try (thanks to linescanner!!). I won't buy anything other than SUN now - no need.

 

Butuz

[cookie_monster]

Yep they are amazing units.

 

Currently I am running 3 x VM's on mine over NFS3 on a single Gigabit link. One terminal server serving 36 thin clients, and 2 low use web servers serving our sharepoint intranet, helpdesk and other random web based software. As linescanner says it is not even being tickled.

 

Will soon be adding another Temrinal Server, a SIMS server, and a couple more low use web servers onto there.

 

Over the next couple of months I hope to upgrade it with port trunking etc to give 3 (hopefully 4) gig links for each SAN and 2 (hopefully 3) gig links to each ESXi server.

 

I am sooooo glad i went a totally different way to everyone else around here and gave Sun a try (thanks to linescanner!!). I won't buy anything other than SUN now - no need.

 

Butuz

 

 

 

I've currently got 3 NIC's in an LACP bond running the iSCSI traffic (might change that to NFS at some point) and one for management at the mo maybe CIFS soon. I was a bit sceptical at first but like I say it's running a few busy servers now and it seems to cope. Except when I’m exporting a Xenserver VM but I think that’s down to a Xenserver bug, I’m looking into that.

[john]

You know Grant you could turn off the charts you don't use so it just shows what you use like I have Will take a photo of mine tomorrow.

 

Our kids love encoding video straight over the LAN from it and it doesn't break a sweat doing that and the video encoding is fine.

[sjl]

This is an image of our 7110. We have 5 VMs and use CIFS for general shares - It is basically our whole admin network SIMS and all. It is only the disk that ever goes cloudy made me think that the caching drives might of solved that. Performance is great though I was pleased it only went as far as cloudy. I could of course (to make myself feel better) change the threshold settings to get all Sunshine - I might not know what's going on but at least it would look nice!

[cookie_monster]

My ops/sec look quite high compared but then it still only drops to slightly cloudy so i'm not going to panic

[Duke]

Here's how our S7410 looks this morning:

 

http://www.hardenhuish.wilts.sch.uk/avatar/s7410_normaluse_201002.png

 

That's 400GB of staff and student resources, all the Year 7's userspaces and roaming profiles, all the mapped start menus (small files but extremely heavy use), and a couple of VMs. At present CIFS has one 1Gb NIC port and NFS has another, network has yet to be a bottleneck.

 

Don't forget things can go pretty far before you need to worry:

 

http://www.hardenhuish.wilts.sch.uk/avatar/s7410_status.png

 

I had a laugh the other day - someone emailed me to let me know they'd just dumped a really big file on resources but it was only going to be there for a couple of days. It didn't bother me, but I thought I'd see if it showed up on the 7410 graphs:

 

http://www.hardenhuish.wilts.sch.uk/avatar/s7410_bigfile.png

 

(that's 94.3Mbps from pretty much one client on a 100Mb NIC)

 

Looking at the past couple of days, my highest figures are:

 

30497 CIFS IOPS

872Mbps NIC

14801 Disk IOPS

 

 

cookie_monster - Couldn't see your pic in the top post for some reason?

 

Chris

Edited February 5, 2010 by Duke

[cookie_monster]

14801 Disk IOPS: Not bad

 

I've only seen upto 146M on the NIC this month.

 

 

This image is on Sky Drive I can see it maybe it's filtered at your end.

 

http://tbgrfq.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p9-OhcM8nSVXGj2SSNF_C9ZgZ7nTiqSxktTYgoLPZBRrsWoS67d-wxZfAqD_4fP9yZ1XLfR1wyHjkUsj3olRWOrEnbkLvohrM/7110.jpg

Edited February 5, 2010 by cookie_monster

[Duke]

Yeah, it was getting filtered by our ISP. Just had a look and it seems healthy enough.

 

Does the 7110 have the SSD accelerators? If not then that's probably why my disk usage looks comparatively lower, the SSDs buffer everything and only hit the HDDs about once every 30 seconds.

 

I'm still waiting on the SAS trays. SSD + SAS should equal awesome Exchange and SQL performance.

 

Chris

[cookie_monster]

No i'm pretty sure the 7110 doesn't have SSD accelerators

[Soulfish]

No SSD's for the 7110 unfortunately . Hoping that my budget plans for next year get accepted and we can start looking at a 7310/7410

[Duke]

They do make a big difference. I've had companies in for server virtualisation planning and they've seen the Sun box and gone "ohh, not sure if your SATA disks will be up to the job...", then they've seen the IOPS you get with the SSDs and gone "oh, er, never mind!".

 

Good times, the S7000 is still the best product I've seen in a long time.

 

Chris

[cookie_monster]

They do make a big difference. I've had companies in for server virtualisation planning and they've seen the Sun box and gone "ohh, not sure if your SATA disks will be up to the job...", then they've seen the IOPS you get with the SSDs and gone "oh, er, never mind!".

 

Good times, the S7000 is still the best product I've seen in a long time.

 

Chris

 

 

 

I couldn't agree more when the bottom of the range box (7110) gives that kind of performance and feature set you know you're onto a strong product line.

[john]

I couldn't agree more when the bottom of the range box (7110) gives that kind of performance and feature set you know you're onto a strong product line.

Agreed, just starting to firm up my plans for my new network setup with all virtualised servers Going to have, in the end, 4 Sun Servers running Citrix (98% decided on that now) Xen Server as hosts with dual quad core CPUs and bags of ram each with the VMs stored on my 7110.

 

Loving the product range wouldn't swap it for anything

[cookie_monster]

Agreed, just starting to firm up my plans for my new network setup with all virtualised servers Going to have, in the end, 4 Sun Servers running Citrix (98% decided on that now) Xen Server as hosts with dual quad core CPUs and bags of ram each with the VMs stored on my 7110.

 

Loving the product range wouldn't swap it for anything

 

 

 

We currently have 8 VM's running on 2 x4150s (Xenserver 5.5) with the VHDs on the 7110, 2 x DC's, 3 x File Servers, Web/Print/WSUS server, Citrix Gateway, and a Citrix box our other 4 Citrix servers are currently on three other boxes 2 physical and 2 VMs on a standalone Xenserver. It all seems to run very well

 

When I get time I think i'll move from iSCSI to NFS that will probably be the summer now when we get a new core switch to layer 3 the whole network.

[Soulfish]

Agreed, just starting to firm up my plans for my new network setup with all virtualised servers Going to have, in the end, 4 Sun Servers running Citrix (98% decided on that now) Xen Server as hosts with dual quad core CPUs and bags of ram each with the VMs stored on my 7110.

 

Loving the product range wouldn't swap it for anything

 

That's our exact setup here . It's a bit of a shame that Sun don't have better support for Citrix but ohh well .

 

I did find one interesting problem with XenServer NFS connecting through to our 7110. Without a DNS server setup on the storage network the 7110 seemed to hang and then not respond to the NFS connection query. Found the DNS solution on the OpenSolaris or Sun storage forums (can't remember which now!), so setup a Linux VM running Bind using the HD storage on one of our servers. Stuck in the DNS and reverse DNS info for the servers and 7110 and it worked first time

[SLMHC]

I had been thinking that my IOPS were a bit high, but, seeing this they look right in line.

 

I've got my 7110 hosting 2 Xenserver hosts which run;

AD

Exchange 2k7

Sharepoint

Desktop Authority

WSUS

TS (minimal usage)

Spiceworks

Symantec AV

Web server

Fog

OCS Inventory

Blood Glucose monitoring

 

I'm also running my SQL backups to an iSCSI LUN. I was running my user and group file backups to it before the MS iSCSI Initiator on my file server decided to wet the bed and not work any longer.

 

I've got the 7110's 4 NICs split into to 3+1. 3 via LACP to my Procurve 2824 using LACP for SAN traffic and the other to my corp stack of procuves. I am planning on adding another 4 port NIC to up the bandwidth for both links. Add in another SAN switch with 3 LACP trunk to each swith and a pair to the corp net.

 

Here is my pretty graph;

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/469410/7110%20Usage.JPG

 

Things are pretty quiet here in this shot. If I catch it running hotter I'll update the post.

Edited February 17, 2010 by SLMHC