San problem

sel

New Member
Jul 17, 2008
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0
1
We've tested to run a virtual server(kvm) with a san disk atached. All seems ok, but if we do some heavy writes(dd if=/dev/null of=<file on san>) to the disk inside the vm, the filesystem goes to pieces. Our setup is like this:

On the host:
san -> fc -> multipath -> lvm
3par -> /dev/sdX -> /dev/mapper/Disk1 -> /dev/vg3

On the guest(stock debian lenny):
virtio -> lvm -> ext3
/dev/vdb -> /dev/vg1/vol1 -> /mnt


I've done a similar configuration with local disk, and that worked ok, but this seems to fail miserably. Does anyone have any advice on where to start? Can it be some bairrier problem?

One other question, would the performance be better if I "export" the fc card directly to the guest using iommu, and would that be a safe thing to do?
 
One other question, would the performance be better if I "export" the fc card directly to the guest using iommu, and would that be a safe thing to do?

Maybe, but PCI pass through does not work reliable currently.
 
We've tested to run a virtual server(kvm) with a san disk atached. All seems ok, but if we do some heavy writes(dd if=/dev/null of=<file on san>) to the disk inside the vm, the filesystem goes to pieces. Our setup is like this:

On the host:
san -> fc -> multipath -> lvm
3par -> /dev/sdX -> /dev/mapper/Disk1 -> /dev/vg3

On the guest(stock debian lenny):
virtio -> lvm -> ext3
/dev/vdb -> /dev/vg1/vol1 -> /mnt


I've done a similar configuration with local disk, and that worked ok, but this seems to fail miserably. Does anyone have any advice on where to start? Can it be some bairrier problem?

One other question, would the performance be better if I "export" the fc card directly to the guest using iommu, and would that be a safe thing to do?
Hi,
i have a similiar configuration but without multipath and it's work very well.

Performance inside VM:
# mount /dev/vda2 /mnt
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/bigfile bs=1024k count=10240 conv=fdatasync
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 56.1908 s, 191 MB/s

vm-config:
name: test-dl
ide2: local:iso/dl1.4.2-i686-server.iso,media=cdrom
bootdisk: virtio0
virtio0: vg_es6600_2_sas_lun17:vm-105-disk-1,cache=none
ostype: l26
memory: 1024
vlan199: e1000=AE:0F:E2:0C:BC:6C
sockets: 1

What performance values do you reach if you mount an lv from the host?

Udo