Hello Patrick, I don't have a lot of Oracle DB experience, but our acquisition had it up with a prod app. They found Oracle behaved much better with 2 vcpus. It wasn't even using 1/3 of a single z9 IFL at peak, but with 2 vcpus it flew compared to 1. The theory was that Oracle must have written the sw to exploit multi-processing since about everything has that now.
So, there's some advice from an interested observer, FWIW :) Marcy "This message may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the addressee or authorized to receive this for the addressee, you must not use, copy, disclose, or take any action based on this message or any information herein. If you have received this message in error, please advise the sender immediately by reply e-mail and delete this message. Thank you for your cooperation." -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:linux-...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of Patrick Spinler Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 4:05 PM To: LINUX-390@vm.marist.edu Subject: [LINUX-390] Advice for perf testing dasd -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all: I'm doing some comparison studies on dasd / disk I/O for different configurations of storage and storage on different virtualization platforms (trying to convince management that oracle on Z is an okay thing). I'd really really appreciate any advice regarding how to structure and go about doing this testing. What I'm thinking about is testing the following: *) our dual, controller based mirrored DS4800s providing EKCD DASD *) Some FCP storage used as EKCD minidisk via z/VM (forget the proper term here) *) Direct guest attached FCP luns Our FCP luns would be coming from a set of HP XP controllers. Lacking other ideas, I plan to use a suitably intensive set of IOzone test runs as my benchmark - trying to test both large and small I/O operations. I'd plan to do all this testing on an up to date install of rhel 5.4 in a single IFL guest, tuned to minimal memory (just barely swapping) with a vdisk high priority swap and an EKCD low priority swap. All the testing would be done on a Z9 LPAR with 2 IFLs, 22 GB of primary storage, 2GB of extended storage, and running z/VM 5.3 *) For EKCD DASD: a single minidisk with no other linux guests on it, configured as the only PV in a volume group, 1 stripe, with one LV, using ext3 with default settings. Served from an IBM 4800 disk controller doing controller based mirroring z/VM Minidisk PAV + dm tunedasd cache multipath cache size |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | yes | yes | 50 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | yes | yes | 10 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | yes | yes | 0 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | yes | no | 50 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | yes | no | 10 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | yes | no | 0 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | no | yes | 50 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | no | yes | 10 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | no | yes | 0 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | no | no | 50 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | no | no | 10 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD | no | no | 0 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | yes | yes | 50 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | yes | yes | 10 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | yes | yes | 0 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | yes | no | 50 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | yes | no | 10 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | yes | no | 0 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | no | yes | 50 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | no | yes | 10 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | no | yes | 0 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | no | no | 50 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | no | no | 10 |=============|===============|===============|============ | EXCD/FCP | no | no | 0 |=============|===============|===============|============ *) For direct guest attached FCP/SAN storage: a single LUN configured using NPIV, using round robin dm-multipathing with 2 paths (note: pending our storage team's commentary), configured as the only PV in a volume group, 1 stripe, with one LV, using ext3 default settings: Since I don't have the option to have z/VM minidisk cache here, I'm going to mess around with the amount of memory linux is allocated, to see how well it behaves with more or less memory available for buffer cache. We don't do controller based mirroring on our XP's, so I'd like to test host based mirroring to an identical lun, also. Note the OS itself would still be installed on EKCD dasd. linux mirroring memory |none |via lvm|via mdadm |==============|=======|=======|========= | minimal | yes | no | no |==============|=======|=======|========= | minimal | no | yes | yes |==============|=======|=======|========= | minimal | no | no | yes |==============|=======|=======|========= | min+256k | yes | no | no |==============|=======|=======|========= | min+256k | no | yes | yes |==============|=======|=======|========= | min+256k | no | no | yes |==============|=======|=======|========= | min+512k | yes | no | no |==============|=======|=======|========= | min+512k | no | yes | yes |==============|=======|=======|========= | min+512k | no | no | yes |==============|=======|=======|========= I'd really appreciate any advice as to how to go about this. Anything ranging from 'you're silly to even consider doing this in light of X, Y, and Z' to 'here's how I did something similar' to 'this benchmark would be much better'. Or anything else at all, really. Thanks for your time! - -- Pat -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAktsshIACgkQNObCqA8uBsxMaQCeNi0p/RJNQuciCHrWUzE4TNwo 2ocAoJG5q7OWkawf7Mkx5kJpcUXoJ95K =w5Ok -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
