[Linux-cluster] GFS and performace

[Gordan Bobic]

Paras pradhan wrote:
> I have a GFS based shared storage cluster that connects to SAN by fibre 
> channel. This GFS shared storage hold several virtual machines. While 
> running hdparam from the host to a GFS share, I get following results.
> 
> --
> hdparm -t /guest_vms1
> 
> /dev/mapper/test_vg1-prd_vg1_lv:
> Timing buffered disk reads:  262 MB in  3.00 seconds =  87.24 MB/sec
> ---
> 
> 
> Now from within the virtual machines, the I/O is low
> 
> ---
> hdparm -t /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 
> 
> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00:
>  Timing buffered disk reads:   88 MB in  3.00 seconds =  29.31 MB/sec
> ---
> 
> I am looking for possibilities if I can increase my I/O read write 
> within my virtual machines. Tuning GFS does help in this case?
> 
> Sorry if my question is not relevant to this list

I suspect you'll find that is pretty normal for virtualization-induced 
I/O penalty. Virtualization really, trully, utterly sucks when it comes 
to I/O performance.

My I/O performance tests (done using kernel building) show that the 
bottleneck was always disk I/O (including when the entire kernel source 
tree is pre-cached, with a 2GB of RAM guest. The _least_ horribly 
performing virtualization solution was VMware (tested with latest player 
3.0, but verified against the latest server, too). That managed to 
complete the task in "only" 140% of the time the bare metal machine did 
(the host machine had it's memory limited to 2GB with the mem= kernel 
option to make sure the test was fair). So, 40% slower than bare metal.

Paravirtualized Xen was close behind, followed very closely by 
non-paravirtualized KVM (which was actually slower when paravirtualized 
drivers were used!). VirtualBox came so far behind it's not even worth 
mentioning.

Nevertheless, it shows that the whole "performance being close to bare 
metal" premise is completely mythical and comes from very selective 
tests (e.g. only testing CPU intensive tasks). But then again we all 
knew that, right?

Gordan