I tried forcing write back with omconfig on 2950 servers where I a) had more 
than reasonable confidence in ups, and b) didn't care anyway because the data 
was replicated.  I couldn't get it to actually work.  And while delaying the 
learn seems to work, forcing a learn at a reasonable time does not reset the 
clock - in other words, the scheduled learn cycle occurs anyway.  So we have 
resorted to scrips that warn of impending learn cycles and delay  to quieter 
times.

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
[email protected]
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 7:48 AM
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: RE: Battery learn-cycle = horrible write performance

 

You're probably better off delaying the battery learn till a low load time. The 
reason I wouldn't recommend switching it to forced write back is that the 
battery isn't protecting the controller cache for a sufficient period when it 
is in learn mode. Therefore if the server lost power you would be much more 
prone to data loss. This is the reason for the behavior.

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert von 
Bismarck
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 8:35 AM
To: linux-poweredge-Lists
Subject: Battery learn-cycle = horrible write performance

 

Hi guys,

 

We have a PE1950III with a PERC6 and two 15k 74Gb disks in RAID 1. This server 
runs a telephony app that is pretty verbose and hits the disk pretty hard 
(5Mb/s sustained). During the battery learn-cycle the performance drops, and 
the load on the server goes through the roof, until the controller is satisfied 
that the battery is ok. In the logs we see that the controller sets the cache 
to write-through for this operation. This is a pretty sensible thing to do, but 
it usually happens late at night, and our duty tech gets woken up because it 
triggers our monitoring system.

 

Going through the OMSA documentation, we found that we could set the cache to 
"Force Write-Back" with omconfig 

 

omconfig storage vdisk action=changepolicy writepolicy=fwb controller=0 vdisk=0 
(untested command)

 

Would enabling this over an extended period be bad, or would it be better to 
enable it before the learn-cycle and disable it right after it's done ?

 

 

Thanks for any hints,

 

Robert von Bismarck
Senior Systems Engineer

 


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