>>> On 10/9/2012 at 06:50 PM, Brad Hinson <[email protected]> wrote: 
-snip-
> I have lots of mod-9 ECKD with HyperPAV enabled, so I want to use LVM.  So my 
> two choices are standard LVM, or LVM striping.  If I stripe across the disks 
> I spread the I/O across the physical volumes, but my gut tells me I shouldn't 
> have to do this, since HyperPAV is moving around aliases dynamically.  For 
> example, say I have 2 PVs and 4 HyperPAV aliases.  If I send some heavy I/O 
> through the Linux (device-mapper) block device, then I would assume:
> 
> - #1, for the case with LVM striping enabled, LVM will spread the I/O to both 
> PVs, and HyperPAV will assign 2 aliases to each PV since I'm banging on them 
> both.
> - #2, for the case without LVM striping, HyperPAV will assign 4 aliases to 
> the first PV since that's the only one in use.
> 
> In either case, it seems I'm using all 4 aliases, so seems like I would get 
> the same performance.  Please correct me if I'm wrong.  And if so, which of 
> these configs is better?

Keep in mind that performance is affected by how many real spindles the I/O is 
being issued against.  A single real disk is only going to be able to do one 
seek, read, etc. at a time.  Whether the storage admin took this into account 
creating the definitions for ECKD devices or not is another matter.  But, if 
they did, and each volume is in a separate subsystem/rank/whatever within the 
storage array, then I would think that a combination of HyperPAV and striping 
would be able to eke out more I/Os than just one volume in one 
subsystem/rank/whatever.  I leave it to the more knowledgeable members of the 
list to either confirm or disembowel this notion.  :)


Mark

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