You may want to try one of the benchmark centers. They allow you to test across 
a spectrum of devices.

I did a benchmark remotely at the IBM/Oracle Joint Solution Center with a 
system z and z storage.

Oracle / ASM/ RAC / Devices / etc.

Contact either IBM or Oracle or me offline for more details.

Gerard


-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Patrick 
Spinler
Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 7:05 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Advice for perf testing dasd

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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

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