XOSTOR hyperconvergence preview

abufrejoval

How do you measure? Do you measure disk I/O e.g. via Jens Axboe's wounderful fio tool or do you measure at the network level e.g. via iperf3first?

I've gotten around 300MB/s write speeds inside a Windows VM using Crystal Disk Mark with 4-way LINSTOR replication using Xcp-ng running nested under VMware Workstation on Windows (Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core with plenty of RAM all NVMe storage).

Iperf3 between these virtual Xcp-ng hosts will only yield around 5Gbit/s, so 300MB/s is rather better than I'd expect, given that each block is replicated 4 times. Reads on Crystal Disk Mark are better than 1.3GB/s as they don't suffer from write amplification and could actually be done round-robin (and it seems they are, too).

But that's a nested virtualization setup, which is really just meant for functional failure testing, not for meaningful benchmarking.

I haven't gotten around to using LINSTOR yet on my physical NUC8/10/11 cluster using 10Gbit NICs, but they give me close to 10Gbit/s with iperf3, while a Xeon-D 1542 based host only reaches about 5-6Gbit/s with budget Aquantia ACC107 NICs all around, that don't support much in terms of offload capabilities.

On oVirt I used an MTU of 9000 to reach full 10Gbit bandwidth on all machines, but I haven't found any documentation on how to increase the MTU on the physical NICs in Xcp-ng yet.

Swen

@abufrejoval I am using dd on Ubuntu20 VMs on 3 ProLiant D360 servers with SSDs. I mounted 1 SSD directly to XCP-ng and 3 to linstor on each server. When I do a

dd if=/dev/zero of=benchfile bs=4k count=2000000 && sync; rm benchfile

on a VM using local storage I get around 185MB/s

when I do the same on 1 VM on linstor storage I get around 125MB/s

but when I do the test on 2 VM on linstor storage on the same XCP-ng host I get around 60MB/s each.

Do me it looks like the NIC is the bottleneck, but please correct me if I am wrong.

Swen

@ronan-a another thing I found is that it linstor occupies more storage than expected. I created the sr with option 'thin'. I created 2 VMs each with 50GB disk. XCP-ng cente ris shoing me

238.7 GB used of 2.6 TB total (150 GB allocated)

I would not expected that! I would expected less than 100 GB used and allocated.

ronan-a

@Swen Could you list the VDIs of your linstor SR please?

Swen

@ronan-a sure, do you mean the output of xe vdi-list?

ronan-a

@Swen Yes, because this allocation value is indeed surprising.

Swen

@ronan-a

[16:30 xcp-test1 ~]# xe vdi-list sr-uuid=77e5097a-c971-34e4-9506-7386a1e640b8
uuid ( RO)                : 23876ae4-27b3-4f2f-8c8b-eb623b2dc2e4
          name-label ( RW): base copy
    name-description ( RW):
             sr-uuid ( RO): 77e5097a-c971-34e4-9506-7386a1e640b8
        virtual-size ( RO): 53687091200
            sharable ( RO): false
           read-only ( RO): true


uuid ( RO)                : 3a2ab3da-5507-4c7e-aa07-497c65b18ec1
          name-label ( RW): ubuntu20-linstor 0
    name-description ( RW): Created by template provisioner
             sr-uuid ( RO): 77e5097a-c971-34e4-9506-7386a1e640b8
        virtual-size ( RO): 53687091200
            sharable ( RO): false
           read-only ( RO): false


uuid ( RO)                : 13a8fa52-9aa3-490b-86e0-eedb101128f9
          name-label ( RW): ubuntu20-linstor 0
    name-description ( RW): Created by template provisioner
             sr-uuid ( RO): 77e5097a-c971-34e4-9506-7386a1e640b8
        virtual-size ( RO): 53687091200
            sharable ( RO): false
           read-only ( RO): false

ok, the third vdi makes sense, cause I used storage-level fast disk clone to duplicate the VM. This explains the allocated value I guess, but not the used one.

Did you see my other question? Are you aware of any NIC constraints regarding throughput?

Swen

@ronan-a Wait a sec, maybe I found the root cause. I created a snapshot of a VM and deleted it. It created another base copy vdi and allocated space is now 200GB. MAybe I need to wait for the celanup job to take care of this?

ronan-a

@Swen The 150GiB are related to the base copy VDI yes.
Of course this value is just the maximum amount of data used because you use the thin LVM plugin. (It's not the real used data.)

Regarding NIC, I didn't encounter any problems during my tests. The best way to measure the DRBD performance is to use fio directly in a VM and also on the host with a DRBD volume.

The difference between local storage and DRBD is not a surprise:

DRBD must sync the data between nodes
DRBD is on top of LVM

abufrejoval

@Swen
Writing zeros should result in nothing written with thin allocation (or dedup and compression): that's why I am hesitant to use /dev/zero as a source.

Of course /dev/random could require to much of an overhead, depending on the quality and implementation which is why I like to use fio: a bit of initial effort to know and understand the tool, but much better control, especially when it comes to dealing with an OS that tries to be smart.

Swen

@ronan-a did you use 10Gbit interfaces for linstor traffic? I am aware that there is a difference between local storage and DRBD, but if this difference is that high, linstor is not really interesting for high performance workloads. I need to be sure that the root cause it not related to my setup.

@ronan-a @abufrejoval which exact fio params are you using to test your environment and can you copy some numbers, so we can compare them?

olivierlambert

We mostly use those displayed in this blog post: https://smcleod.net/tech/2016/04/29/benchmarking-io/

edit: depending on the storage, iodepth can be increased.

abufrejoval

@Swen

There is obviously tons of variations....

I've used this fio file a lot to quickly gain an understanding of how a bit of storage performs.

Basically it only uses a small 100MB file, but tells the OS to avoid buffering and then goes over that with a mix of reads and writes, mostly transitioning between block size, essentially going from super random to almost sequential in a single run.

It's helped me find issues with Gluster, identify network bandwidth issues or even find deteriorated RAIDs with a bad BBU. Creates the test file in the working directiory unless changed.

[global]
filename=fio.file
ioengine=libaio
rw=randrw
size=100m
norandommap
direct=1
iodepth=1
time_based
runtime=10
[B512]
bs=512
stonewall
[B1k]
bs=1k
stonewall
[B2k]
bs=2k
stonewall
[b4k]
bs=4k
stonewall
[b8k]
bs=8k
stonewall
[b16k]
bs=16k
stonewall
[b32k]
bs=32k
[b64k]
bs=64k
stonewall
[b512k]
bs=512k
stonewall
[b1m]
bs=1m
stonewall

Numbers: It should approach the network bandwidth towards the end (potentially divided by write amplification).

dumarjo

@ronan-a Hi,

I tested your branch and now the new added hosts to the pool are now attached to the XOSTOR. This is nice !

I have looked at the code, but I'm not sure if in the current state of your branch we can add a disk on the new host and update the replication ? I think not... but just to be sure.

ronan-a

@dumarjo linstor resource-group modify --place-count=X should be enough to update the replication. I'm not sure to add a command in the plugin now (but probably yes for XOA integration).

Maelstrom96

@ronan-a said in XOSTOR hyperconvergence preview:

For some VMs that have built-in software replication/HA, like DBs, it might be prefered to have replication=1 set for the VDI.

We can authorize this behavior without having other SRs. It would suffice to pass a replication parameter for this particular VDI when it is created. So thank you for this feedback. I think we must implement this use case for the future.

@ronan-a Have anything been done regarding this feature? I scanned the thread, but I couldn't really find anything related to a new VDI option.

olivierlambert

It might be done in the future, but that's not the priority for a v1

Maelstrom96

@olivierlambert
I just checked the sm repository, and it looks like it wouldn't be that complicated to add a new sm-config and pass it down to the volume creation. Do you accept PR/Contributions on that repository? We're really interested in this feature and I think I can take the time to write the code to handle this.

olivierlambert

The problem will be about to compute the available space if you have different replication number.

But in any cases, contributions are always welcome, we'll discuss details in PR.

geoffbland

I am trying this on pool with 5 hosts. Each host has a 4TB HDD installed that I am using for this.

Following the instructions here I download the installer and run it with ./install --disks /dev/sda --force - this runs through and no errors are shown but right at the end it displays:

 Volume group "linstor_group" not found
  Cannot process volume group linstor_group
  Physical volume "/dev/sda" successfully created.
  Volume group "linstor_group" successfully created

But then checking the disk I don't see the expected partitions:

[09:12 XCPNG01 ~]# lsblk
...
sda                               8:0    0   3.7T  0 disk
<nothing here>
...

Versions

[09:34 XCPNG01 ~]# uname -a
Linux XCPNG01 4.19.0+1 #1 SMP Thu Jan 13 12:55:45 CET 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[09:28 XCPNG01 ~]# rpm -qa | grep -E "^(sm|xha)-.*linstor.*"
sm-2.30.6-1.1.0.linstor.1.xcpng8.2.x86_64
xha-10.1.0-2.2.0.linstor.1.xcpng8.2.x86_64

I should mention that this disk was previously mounted as an SR but is no longer, and also was part of a glusterfs store but is no longer.

If I run ./install --disks /dev/sda --force a second time it obviously has not much to do as it has installed everything but now I get a slightly different error:

Package python-linstor-1.12.0-1.noarch already installed and latest version
Nothing to do
  VG            #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize  VFree
  linstor_group   1   0   0 wz--n- <3.64t <3.64t
  Volume group "linstor_group" successfully removed
  Volume group "sda" not found
  Cannot process volume group sda
Failed to execute vgremove properly.

What should I do to work out what the problem is?