RE: spindles - I don't think that's my problem, as this all started
happening when i was still on a 3-node Lefthand cluster, with 12
spindles, and now the LUNs on this server are split between the same
cluster and a new EMC VNXe 3100 with 6 spindles. I could be wrong, but
it seems unlikely.

I'll take a look at the Toke tag on the report when I get into work
this morning.

Thanks,

Kurt

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 22:03, Brian Desmond <[email protected]> wrote:
> Yes. Security tokens are stored in Paged Pool. When you get the token bloat 
> issue (well if you start approaching it), you will start seeing issues on x86 
> application servers where they are running out of paged pool. If you look at 
> a report of paged pool consumers, you'll find the Toke tag at the top.
>
> # of spindles is going to directly correlate to disk queue lengths and 
> latency. If you have 2 spindles which can do 100 IOPS each, and you are 
> throwing 225 IOPS at them, you will have a problem. If you add a third 
> spindle, now you have 75 IOPS head room.
>
> Thanks,
> Brian Desmond
> [email protected]
>
> w – 312.625.1438 | c   – 312.731.3132
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Monday, February 13, 2012 11:13 PM
> To: NT System Admin Issues
> Subject: Re: Picking up file server tuning again
>
> PSTs on file shares - it's been a while since I looked at that issue.
>
> Crappy drivers are a small possibility - it is a P2V of an old machine.
>
> I'm not sure that the number of spindles has anything to do with it, and in 
> any case there isn't anything I can do about that for a while.
>
> Can you explain what you mean by "large tokens"? Is that related to token 
> bloat in AD, or is it something else?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kurt
>
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 19:25, Brian Desmond <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Well, the % Interrupts/DPC Time/Kernel Mode CPU time isn't necessarily going 
>> to be fixed by x64. It may very well mean you've got some crappy drivers in 
>> play.
>>
>> The disk stuff indicates the disk is not fast enough to keep up with demand. 
>> You can solve that with more spindles or faster spindles.
>>
>> Page Pool utilization will be resolved by x64 (or even x86 on 2008). That's 
>> indicative of crappy drivers, large tokens, and/or people doing things like 
>> using PSTs off file shares.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Brian Desmond
>> [email protected]
>>
>> w – 312.625.1438 | c   – 312.731.3132
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[email protected]]
>> Sent: Monday, February 13, 2012 6:18 PM
>> To: NT System Admin Issues
>> Subject: RE: Picking up file server tuning again
>>
>> Well, the kernel mode, paged pool, and interrupt time are items that will be 
>> specifically reduced with an x64 OS.
>>
>> The I/O situation is indicative of disk queuing which is "hypervisor 
>> related". Dunno how you optimize that in VMware, there are a number of 
>> potentials in Hyper-V.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Michael B. Smith
>> Consultant and Exchange MVP
>> http://TheEssentialExchange.com
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[email protected]]
>> Sent: Monday, February 13, 2012 5:33 PM
>> To: NT System Admin Issues
>> Subject: Re: Picking up file server tuning again
>>
>> It *is* a busy box, and migrating the iSCSI LUNs to a 64bit server is
>> something I've definitely considered. I have a Dell R310 with 16gb RAM
>> that I could use, but it's already got 9 active VMs, although they're
>> not heavy hitters. AFAICT, probably the highest-use machines on the
>> ESXi 4.1 box are the secondary DC (no FSMO roles, but does do DNS and
>> WINS) and the issuing CA box.
>>
>> It's currently a VM on what I believe to be an underpowered ESX 3.5 box - I 
>> think it's possible that it's simply starved for resources on that ESX box.
>>
>> I'm sure there's something out there like perfmon for VMware that I can use 
>> to capture performance over time - I'd like to measure and analyze the 
>> performance of the ESX 3.5 box while the backups are happening against the 
>> file server.
>>
>> I'm also considering moving the Win2k3 file server VM to the ESX box and 
>> seeing if the situation improves.
>>
>> Kurt
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 12:08, Michael B. Smith <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>>> That's a busy box. I'd suggest moving to a 64-bit OS.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Michael B. Smith
>>> Consultant and Exchange MVP
>>> http://TheEssentialExchange.com
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[email protected]]
>>> Sent: Monday, February 13, 2012 3:00 PM
>>> To: NT System Admin Issues
>>> Subject: Re: Picking up file server tuning again
>>>
>>> Ran PAL against the log.
>>>
>>> Um, wow. It's a freaking christmas tree - red and yellow all over the
>>> place in CPU and disk.
>>>
>>> Who should I be talking with to analyze this?
>>>
>>> A sample of the issues shown - all of which show up in more than one
>>> time slice - some in every or almost every slice:
>>> o- More than 50% Processor Utilization
>>> o- More than 30% privileged (kernel) mode CPU usage
>>> o- More than 2 packets are waiting in the output queue
>>> o- Greater than 25ms physical disk READ response times
>>> o- Greater than 25ms physical disk WRITE response times
>>> o- More than 80% of Pool Paged Kernel Memory Used
>>> o- More than 2 I/O's are waiting on the physical disk
>>> o- 20 (Processor(_Total)\DPC Rate)
>>> o- More than 30% Interrupt Time
>>> o- Greater than 1000 page inputs per second (Memory\Pages Input/sec)
>>>
>>> Some things that showed no alerts:
>>> o- Memory\Available MBytes
>>> o- Memory\Free System Page Table Entrie
>>> o- Memory\Pages/sec
>>> o- Memory\System Cache Resident Bytes
>>> o- Memory\Cache Bytes
>>> o- Memory\% Committed Bytes In Use
>>> o- Network Interface(*)\% Network Utilization
>>>     MS TCP Loopback interface
>>>     VMware Accelerated AMD PCNet Adapter
>>>     VMware Accelerated AMD PCNet Adapter#1
>>> o- Network Interface(*)\Packets Outbound Errors
>>>     MS TCP Loopback interface
>>>     VMware Accelerated AMD PCNet Adapter
>>>     VMware Accelerated AMD PCNet Adapter#1
>>>
>>>
>>> Kurt
>>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 16:04, Brian Desmond <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> Rather than trying to do this yourself, check out PAL - 
>>>> http://pal.codeplex.com/. It will setup all the right counters for you and 
>>>> crunch the data.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Brian Desmond
>>>> [email protected]
>>>>
>>>> w – 312.625.1438 | c   – 312.731.3132
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[email protected]]
>>>> Sent: Friday, February 10, 2012 4:43 PM
>>>> To: NT System Admin Issues
>>>> Subject: Picking up file server tuning again
>>>>
>>>> I'm getting back to monitoring my situation with the file server again, 
>>>> and just finished a perfmon session covering the 3rd through the 7th of 
>>>> this month. Simultaneously, I set up perfmon on the same workstation to 
>>>> monitor the backup server.
>>>>
>>>> If anyone cares to help, I'd be deeply appreciative.
>>>>
>>>> I set up perfmon on a Win7 VM on an ESXi 4.1 host to take measurements at 
>>>> 60 second intervals of a whole bunch of counters, many of them probably 
>>>> just noise.
>>>>
>>>> I'll describe the history of the configuration first, however:
>>>>
>>>> The file server is a Win2k3 R2 VM running on a ESX 3.5 host with 16g of 
>>>> RAM - it's one of 10 VMs, and is definitely the heaviest hitter in terms 
>>>> of disk I/O. About 2.5-3 months ago we noticed that the time to completion 
>>>> for the weekly full backups spiked dramatically.
>>>>
>>>> Prior to that time, the fulls would start around 7pm on a Friday, and 
>>>> finish by about 7pm on Sunday.
>>>>
>>>> Now they take until Thursday or Friday to complete.
>>>>
>>>> This coincided with some changes to the environment: I had to move
>>>> the VM to a new host (it was a manual copy - we don't have vmotion
>>>> licensed and configured for these hosts) and at about that time I
>>>> also had to expand 2 of the 4 LUNS.  Finally, the OS drive for the
>>>> VM on the old host was on a LUN on our Lefthand unit - I had to
>>>> migrate it to the local disk storage on the new home for the VM. The
>>>> 4 data drives for this VM are attached via the MSFT iSCSI client
>>>> running on the VM, not through VMWare's iSCSI client. So, at that
>>>> point, all of the LUNS were on the Lefthand SAN, which is a 3-node
>>>> cluster, and we use 2-way replication for all LUNS. The 2 LUNS that
>>>> were expanded went to 2tb or slightly beyond. The Lefthand has two
>>>> NSM 2060s and a P4300G2, with 6 and 8 disks each, respectively - a
>>>> total of 20 disks
>>>>
>>>> Since that time, I've also added in our EMC VNXe 3100 with 6 disks in it 
>>>> in a RAID6 array. I mention this because this means that all of the file 
>>>> systems on the VNXe are clean and defragged.
>>>>
>>>> Currently, I've migrated 3 of the 4 data LUNs for the VM to the EMC. I 
>>>> made sure to align the partitions on the EMC to a megabyte boundary.
>>>>
>>>> So, to make this simpler to visualize, a little table:
>>>>
>>>> c: - local disk on ESX 3.5, 40gb, 23.6gb free
>>>> j: - iSCSI LUN on Lefthand, 2.5tb, 900gb free
>>>> k: - iSCSI LUN on VNXe, 1.98tb, 336gb free
>>>> l: - iSCSI LUN on VNXe, 1tb, 79gb free
>>>> m: - iSCSI LUN on VNXe 750gb, 425gb free
>>>>
>>>> I tried to capture separate disk queue stats for each LUN, but in spite of 
>>>> selecting and adding each drive letter separately in the perfmon 
>>>> interface, all I got was _Total.
>>>>
>>>> Selected stats are as follows:
>>>>
>>>>     PhysicalDisk counters
>>>> Current disk queue length - average 0.483, maximum 33.000 Average
>>>> disk read queue length - 0.037, maximum 1.294 %disk time - average
>>>> 34.068, maximum 153.877 Average disk write queue length - average
>>>> 0.645, maximum 2.828 Average disk queue length - average 0.681,
>>>> maximum 3.078
>>>>
>>>> I have more data on PhysicalDisk, and data on other objects, including 
>>>> Memory, NetworkInterface, Paging File, Processor and  Server Work Queues.
>>>>
>>>> If anyone has thoughts, I'd surely like to hear them.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Kurt
>>>>
>>>> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~
>>>> <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/>  ~
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~
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>>>> ---
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>>>
>>> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~
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> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ 
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