Initializing File-IO Volumes

[Laxity]

Thanks Sh-J,

I discovered the link to the statistics with your help

[jmo]

A possibility to set the priority for the init. task would be nice.

I am right now initializing a 1.4TB Volume.

The VMs that are running on the XenServer hosts are terribly slow now because of this.
I would not mind if the init. procedure would take twice as long or even longer if my VMs would work normally then..

It has nothing to do with CPU or RAM in my case. RAM usage is at 7% and CPUs are at normal temperature. BTW: is there a way to look at the CPU usage using the console? I can only see my CPU Temperatures using the IMPI module..

The init is quite fast -aprox. 1.5h for an 1.4TB volume on a Raid-6 (5x1TB discs on areca 1261 controller).

A happy new year to you all!

And now to something complete different...

I've run an init of a 100GB FC volume yesterday... it took only a good handful of minutes, but caused a load of 26... all FC targets for our Xen server disconnected because of time-outs. I had quite a recovery job to do, a Sunday favorite of mine :-(

(We as well had no major CPU usage, memory was mostly free (we have 4GB in the machine, running in 32 bit mode with mostly FC targets that sure is a waste of memory), our RAID peaked at 190k sectors/s writes, which seems close to the maximum to be expected) And please don't blame the disks... as the disks are always the bottleneck, it's only a question of the FC volume size to bring the system to its limits with even the fastest disks. A proper system design would limit the priority of the init job to allow the productive resources to remain usable.

This is definitely a show-stopper for proper production use, we'll have to shut down all VMs prior to creating even mid-size (100GB nd above) FC targets :-(

With regards,
Jens

[enealDC]

If i were you, I just would not bother to use file-io volumes. Stick with block-mode and suffer the performance penalty. This was my decision because I was trying to avoid this very same issue.

It's not unusual to make adds/remove to a SAN during business hours. The action should not cause a major service interruption..