X-Ray

How to run vdbench benchmark on any HCI with X-Ray

Posted on by gary

Many storage performance testers are familiar with vdbench, and wish to use it to test Hyper-Converged (HCI) performance. To accurately performance test HCI you need to deploy workloads on all HCI nodes. However, deploying multiple VMs and coordinating vdbench can be tricky, so with X-ray we provide an easy way to run vdbench at scale. Here’s how to do it.

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Working with fio “distribution /pereto” parameter

Posted on by gary

The fio Pareto parameter allows us to create a workload, which references a very large dataset, but specify a hotspot for the access pattern.  Here’s an example using the same setup as the ILM experiment, but using a Pareto value of 0:8.  My fio file looks like this..

[global]
ioengine=libaio
direct=1
time_based
norandommap
random_distribution=pareto:0.8
The experiment shows that with the access pattern as a Pareto ratio 0:8, meaning 20% of the overall dataset is “hot” the ILM process happens much faster as the hotspot is smaller, and is identified faster than a 100% uniform random access pattern.  We would expect a similar shape for any sort of caching mechanism.

X-Ray scenario to demonstrate Nutanix ILM behavior.

Posted on by gary

Specifically a customer wanted to see how performance changes (and how quickly) as data moves from HDD to SSD automatically as data is accessed.  The access pattern is 100% random across the entire disk.

In a hybrid Flash/HDD system – “cold” data (i.e. data that has not been accessed for a long time) is moved from SSD to HDD when the SSD capacity is exhausted.  At some point in the future – that same data may become “hot” again, and so we want to make sure that the “newly hot” data is quickly moved back to the SSD tier.  The duration of the above chart is around 5 minutes – and we see that by, around the 3 minute mark the entire dataset is resident on the SSD tier.

This X-ray test uses a couple of neat tricks to demonstrate ILM behavior.

  • Edit container preferences to send sequential data immediately to HDD
  • Overwriting data with NUL/Zero bytes frees the underlying data on Nutanix filesystem

To demonstrate ILM from HDD to SSD (ad ultimately into the DRAM cache on the CVM) we first have to ensure that we have data on the HDD in the first place.  By default Nutanix OS will always try to write new data to SSD.  To circumvent that behavior we can edit the container preferences.  We use the fact that the “prefill” will be a sequential workload, while the measured workload will be a random workload. To make the change, use “ncli” to change the ” Sequential I/O Pri Order” to be HDD only.

In my case I happened to call my container “xray” since I didn’t want to change the default container. Now, when X-Ray executes the prefill stage, the data will land on HDD. As a second requirement, we want to see what happens when IO with different size blocks are issued so that we can get a chart similar to this: To achieve the desired behavior, we need to make sure that, at the beginning of each test, the data, again resides on HDD.  The problem is that the data is up-migrated during the test. To do this we do an initial overwrite of the entire disk with “NULL” bytes using  a parameter in fio “zero_buffers”.  This causes the data to be freed on the Nutanix filesystem.  Then we issue a normal profile with random data. Once the data is freed, then we know that the new initial writes will go to HDD – because we edited the container to do so. The overall test pattern looks like this

  • Create and clone VMs
  • Prefill with random data (Data will reside on HDD due to container edit)
  • Read disk with 16KB block size
  • Zero out the disks – to remove/free the up-migrated data
  • Prefill the disks with Radom data
  • Read disk with 32KB block size
  • Zero out the disks
  • Prefill with random daa
  • Read disk with 64KB block size

I have uploaded this x-ray test to GitHub : X-Ray Up-Migration test

 

 

HCI Performance testing made easy (Part 4)

Posted on by gary

What happens when power is lost to all nodes of a HCI Cluster?

Ever wondered what happens when all power is simultaneously lost on a HCI cluster?  One of the core principles of cloud design is that components are expected to fail, but the cluster as a whole should stay “up”.   We wanted to see what happens when all components fail at once, so we designed an X-Ray test to do exactly that.

We start an OLTP workload on every node in the cluster, then X-Ray connects to the IPMI port on each node, and powers off all the hosts while the cluster is under load.  In particular, the cluster is under read/write load (we need write workload, because we want to force the cluster to recover in-flight writes).

After power-off, we wait 10 seconds for everything to spin down, then immediately re-apply the power by connecting to the IPMI ports.

The nodes power up, and immediately start their POST (Power On Self Test) and boot the hypervisor.  The CVM will auto-start, discover the available nodes and form the cluster.

X-Ray polls the cluster manager (either Prism or vCenter) to determine that the cluster is “up” and then restarts the OLTP workload.

Our testing showed that our Nutanix cluster completed POST, and was ready to restart work in around 10 minutes.  Moreover, the time to achieve the recovery had very little variability. The chart below shows three separate runs on the same cluster.

This is the YAML file which defines the workload.  The full specification is on github.  The key part of the YAML is the nodes.PowerOff which connects to the IMPI ports of each node and vm_group.WaitForPowerOn which connects to either Nutanix Prism or vmware vCenter and determines that the cluster is formed, and ready to accept new work.

HCI Performance testing made easy (Part 3)

Posted on by gary

Creating a HCI benchmark to simulate multi-tennent workloads

 

 

HCI deployments are typically multi-tennant and often different nodes will support different types of workloads. It is very common to have large resource-hungry databases separated across nodes using anti-affinity rules.  As with traditional storage, applications are writing to a shared storage environment which is necessary to support VM movement.  It is the shared storage that often causes performance issues for data bases which are otherwise separated across nodes.  We call this the noisy neighbor problem.  A particular problem occurs when a reporting / analytical workload shares storage with a transactional workload.

In such a case we have a Bandwidth heavy workload profile (reporting) sharing with a Latency Sensitive workload (transactional)

In the past it has been difficult to measure the noisy neighbor impact without going to the trouble of configuring the entire DB stack, and finding some way to drive it.  However in X-Ray we can do exactly this sort of workload.  We supply a pre-configured scenario which we call the  DB Colocation test.

The DB Colocation test utilizes two properties of X-Ray not found in other benchmarking tools

  • Time based benchmark actions
  • Distinct per-VM workload patterns
  • Ability to provision particular workloads, to particular hosts

In our example scenario X-Ray begins by starting a workload modeled after a transactional DB (we call this the OLTP workload) on one of the nodes.  This workload runs for 60 minutes.  Then after 30 minutes X-Ray starts workloads modeled after reporting/analytical workloads on two other nodes (we call this the DSS workload).

After 30 minutes we have three independent workloads running on three independent nodes, but sharing the same storage.  The key thing to observe is the impact on the latency sensitive (OLTP) workload.  In this experiment it is the DSS workloads which are the noisy neighbor, since they will tend to utilize a lot of the storage bandwidth.  An ideal result is one where there is very little interference with the running OLTP workload, even though we expect latency to increase.  We can compare the impact on the OLTP workload by comparing the IOPS/response time during the first 30 minutes (no interference) with the remaining 60 minutes (after the DSS workloads are started).  We should expect to see some increase in response time from the OLTP application because the other nodes in the cluster have gone from idle to under-load.  The key thing to observe is whether the OLTP IOP target rate (4,000 IOPS) is achieved when the reporting workload is applied.

 

X-Ray Scenario configuration

We specify the timing rules and workloads in the test.yml file.  You can modify this to contain whichever values suit your model.  I covered editing an existing workload in Part 1.

The overall scenario begins with the OLTP workload, which will run for 3600 seconds (1 hour).  The stagger_secs value is used if there are multiple OLTP sub-workloads.  In the simple case we do use a single OLTP workload.

The scenario pauses for 1800 seconds using the test.wait specification then immediately starts the DSS workload

Finally the scenario uses the workload.Wait specification to wait for the OLTP workload to finish (approx 1 hour) before the test is deemed completed.

X-Ray Workload specification

The DB Co-Location test uses two workload profiles that aim to simulate transactional (OLTP) and reporting/analytical (DSS) workloads.  The specifications for those workloads are contained in the two .fio files (oltp.fio and dss.fio)

OLTP

The OLTP workload (oltp.fio) that we ship as  has the following characteristcs based on typical configurations that we see in the field (of course you can change these to whatever you like).

  • Target IOP rate of 4,000 IOPS
  • 4 “Data” Disks
    • 50/50 read/write ratio.
    • 90% 8KB, 10% 32KB bloc-ksize
    • 8 outstanding IO per disk
  • 2 “Log” Disks
    • 100% write
    • 90% sequential
    • 32k block-size
    • 1 outstanding IO per disk

The idea here is to simulate the two main storage workloads of a DB.  The “data” portion and the “log” portion.  Log writes are just used to commit transactions and so are 100% write.  The only time the logs are read is during DB recovery, which is not part of this scenario.  The “Data” disks are doing both reads (from DB cache misses) and writes committed transactions.  A 50/50 read/write mix might be considered too write intensive – but we wanted to stress the storage in this scenario.

DSS

The DSS workload is configured to have the following characteristics

  • Target IOP rate of 1400 IOPS
  • 4 “Data” Disks
    • 100% Read workload with 1MB blocksize
    • 10 Outstanding IOs
  • 2 “Log” Disk
    • 100% Write workload
    • 90% sequential
    •  32K block-size
    • 1 outstanding IO per disk

The idea here is to simulate a large database doing a lot of reads across a large workingset size.  The IO to the data disks is entirely read, and uses large blocks to simulate a database scanning a lot of records.  The “Log” disks have a very light workload, purely to simulate an active database which is probably updating a few tables used for housekeeping.