I've had a bit of luck here.

Overall IO performance is very poor during Windows updates, but a contributing factor seems to be the "SCSI Controller" device in the guest. This last install I didn't install a driver for that device, and my performance is much better. Updates still chug along quite slowly, but I seem to have more than the < 100KB/s write speeds I was seeing previously.

Does anyone know what this device is for? I have the "Red Hat VirtIO SCSI Controller" listed under storage controllers.

Steve Dainard 
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On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 2:33 AM, Itamar Heim <iheim@redhat.com> wrote:
On 01/26/2014 02:37 AM, Steve Dainard wrote:
Thanks for the responses everyone, really appreciate it.

I've condensed the other questions into this reply.


    Steve,
    What is the CPU load of the GlusterFS host when comparing the raw
    brick test to the gluster mount point test? Give it 30 seconds and
    see what top reports. You’ll probably have to significantly increase
    the count on the test so that it runs that long.

    - Nick



Gluster mount point:

*4K* on GLUSTER host
[root@gluster1 rep2]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/rep2/test1 bs=4k count=500000
500000+0 records in
500000+0 records out
2048000000 <tel:2048000000> bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 100.076 s, 20.5 MB/s


Top reported this right away:
PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  1826 root      20   0  294m  33m 2540 S 27.2  0.4   0:04.31 glusterfs
  2126 root      20   0 1391m  31m 2336 S 22.6  0.4  11:25.48 glusterfsd

Then at about 20+ seconds top reports this:
   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  1826 root      20   0  294m  35m 2660 R 141.7  0.5   1:14.94 glusterfs
  2126 root      20   0 1392m  31m 2344 S 33.7  0.4  11:46.56 glusterfsd

*4K* Directly on the brick:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test1 bs=4k count=500000
500000+0 records in
500000+0 records out
2048000000 <tel:2048000000> bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 4.99367 s, 410 MB/s


  7750 root      20   0  102m  648  544 R 50.3  0.0   0:01.52 dd
  7719 root      20   0     0    0    0 D  1.0  0.0   0:01.50 flush-253:2

Same test, gluster mount point on OVIRT host:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/rep2/test1 bs=4k count=500000
500000+0 records in
500000+0 records out
2048000000 <tel:2048000000> bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 42.4518 s, 48.2 MB/s


   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  2126 root      20   0 1396m  31m 2360 S 40.5  0.4  13:28.89 glusterfsd


Same test, on OVIRT host but against NFS mount point:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/rep2-nfs/test1 bs=4k count=500000
500000+0 records in
500000+0 records out
2048000000 <tel:2048000000> bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 18.8911 s, 108 MB/s


PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  2141 root      20   0  550m 184m 2840 R 84.6  2.3  16:43.10 glusterfs
  2126 root      20   0 1407m  30m 2368 S 49.8  0.4  13:49.07 glusterfsd

Interesting - It looks like if I use a NFS mount point, I incur a cpu
hit on two processes instead of just the daemon. I also get much better
performance if I'm not running dd (fuse) on the GLUSTER host.


        The storage servers are a bit older, but are both dual socket
        quad core

        opterons with 4x 7200rpm drives.


    A block size of 4k is quite small so that the context switch
    overhead involved with fuse would be more perceivable.

    Would it be possible to increase the block size for dd and test?



        I'm in the process of setting up a share from my desktop and
        I'll see if

        I can bench between the two systems. Not sure if my ssd will
        impact the

        tests, I've heard there isn't an advantage using ssd storage for
        glusterfs.


    Do you have any pointers to this source of information? Typically
    glusterfs performance for virtualization work loads is bound by the
    slowest element in the entire stack. Usually storage/disks happen to
    be the bottleneck and ssd storage does benefit glusterfs.

    -Vijay


I had a couple technical calls with RH (re: RHSS), and when I asked if
SSD's could add any benefit I was told no. The context may have been in
a product comparison to other storage vendors, where they use SSD's for
read/write caching, versus having an all SSD storage domain (which I'm
not proposing, but which is effectively what my desktop would provide).

Increasing bs against NFS mount point (gluster backend):
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/rep2-nfs/test1 bs=128k count=16000
16000+0 records in
16000+0 records out
2097152000 <tel:2097152000> bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 19.1089 s, 110 MB/s



GLUSTER host top reports:
   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  2141 root      20   0  550m 183m 2844 R 88.9  2.3  17:30.82 glusterfs
  2126 root      20   0 1414m  31m 2408 S 46.1  0.4  14:18.18 glusterfsd

So roughly the same performance as 4k writes remotely. I'm guessing if I
could randomize these writes we'd see a large difference.


    Check this thread out,
    http://raobharata.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/qemu-glusterfs-native-integration/ it's
    quite dated but I remember seeing similar figures.

    In fact when I used FIO on a libgfapi mounted VM I got slightly
    faster read/write speeds than on the physical box itself (I assume
    because of some level of caching). On NFS it was close to half..
    You'll probably get a little more interesting results using FIO
    opposed to dd

    ( -Andrew)


Sorry Andrew, I meant to reply to your other message - it looks like
CentOS 6.5 can't use libgfapi right now, I stumbled across this info in
a couple threads. Something about how the CentOS build has different
flags set on build for RHEV snapshot support then RHEL, so native
gluster storage domains are disabled because snapshot support is assumed
and would break otherwise. I'm assuming this is still valid as I cannot
get a storage lock when I attempt a gluster storage domain.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've setup a NFS storage domain on my desktops SSD. I've re-installed
win 2008 r2 and initially it was running smoother.

Disk performance peaks at 100MB/s.

If I copy a 250MB file from a share into the Windows VM, it writes out
quickly, less than 5 seconds.

If I copy 20 files, ranging in file sizes from 4k to 200MB, totaling in
650MB from the share - windows becomes unresponsive, in top the
desktop's nfs daemon is barely being touched at all, and then eventually
is not hit. I can still interact with the VM's windows through the spice
console. Eventually the file transfer will start and rocket through the
transfer.

I've opened a 271MB zip file with 4454 files and started the extract
process but the progress windows will sit on 'calculating...' after a
significant period of time the decompression starts and runs at
<200KB/second. Windows is guesstimating 1HR completion time. Eventually
even this freezes up, and my spice console mouse won't grab. I can still
see the resource monitor in the Windows VM doing its thing but have to
poweroff the VM as its no longer usable.

The windows update process is the same. It seems like when the guest
needs quick large writes its fine, but lots of io causes serious
hanging, unresponsiveness, spice mouse cursor freeze, and eventually
poweroff/reboot is the only way to get it back.

Also, during window 2008 r2 install the 'expanding windows files' task
is quite slow, roughly 1% progress every 20 seconds (~30 mins to
complete). The GLUSTER host shows these stats pretty consistently:
PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  8139 root      20   0 1380m  28m 2476 R 83.1  0.4   8:35.78 glusterfsd
  8295 root      20   0  550m 186m 2980 S  4.3  2.4   1:52.56 glusterfs

bwm-ng v0.6 (probing every 2.000s), press 'h' for help
input: /proc/net/dev type: rate
   \         iface                   Rx                   Tx
    Total

==============================================================================
                lo:        3719.31 KB/s         3719.31 KB/s
7438.62 KB/s
              eth0:        3405.12 KB/s         3903.28 KB/s
7308.40 KB/s


I've copied the same zip file to an nfs mount point on the OVIRT host
(gluster backend) and get about 25 - 600 KB/s during unzip. The same
test on NFS mount point (desktop SSD ext4 backend) averaged a network
transfer speed of 5MB/s and completed in about 40 seconds.

I have a RHEL 6.5 guest running on the NFS/gluster backend storage
domain, and just did the same test. Extracting the file took 22.3
seconds (faster than the fuse mount point on the host !?!?).

GLUSTER host top reported this while the RHEL guest was decompressing
the zip file:
   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  2141 root      20   0  555m 187m 2844 S  4.0  2.4  18:17.00 glusterfs
  2122 root      20   0 1380m  31m 2396 S  2.3  0.4  83:19.40 glusterfsd





*Steve Dainard *
IT Infrastructure Manager
Miovision <http://miovision.com/> | /Rethink Traffic/
519-513-2407 <tel:519-513-2407> ex.250
877-646-8476 <tel:877-646-8476> (toll-free)

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please note currently (>3.3.1), we don't use libgfapi on fedora as well, as we found some gaps in functionality in the libvirt libgfapi support for snapshots. once these are resolved, we can re-enable libgfapi on a glusterfs storage domain.