LUN Stacker

A recent post from Martin "The Bod" Glassborow got me thinking about the whole process of LUN consolidation. I've done lots of migrations where people quake at the thought of changing the LUN size from one array to another. Now, I almost always want to change LUN sizes, as the vendor specific ones - 8.43GB/13.59GB etc are pretty painful and wasteful at the same time.

There's another good reason to standardise on LUNs. If you've implemented a good dual-vendor strategy and sorted your firmware driver stack out, then you can position to take storage from any of your preferred vendors. There's nothing better than having all of your vendors sweating on that next 500TB purchase when they know you take your storage from either or EMC/HDS/HP/IBM.

If LUNs and the I/O stack are all standardised, you can move data around too. The difficult part as alluded to in Martin's post is achieving the restacking of data.





Here's the problem; SAN storage is inherently block based and the underlying hardware has no idea of how you will lay out your data. Have a look at the following diagram. Each LUN from a SAN perspective is divided into blocks and each block has a logical block address. The array just services requests from the host for a block of data and reads/writes it on demand. It is the operating system which determines how the file system should be laid out on the underlying storage. Each volume will have a standard location (or standard method of calculating the location) for what was called the VTOC (Volume Table of Contents), also known as the FAT (File Allocation Table) in DOS and MFT (Master File Table) in NTFS. There are similar constructs for other O/S versions like Linux but I'm not 100% certain of the terminology so won't risk the rath of getting it wrong.



The layout of data on a file system is not a trivial task. Apart from keeping track of files, there's the requirement to keep track of free space and to be able to recreate the file index in the case of corruption, so some kind of journalling is likely to be implemented. There are also features such as compression, Single Instancing, Encryption, etc which all add to the mix of understanding exactly how file data is laid out on disk.



Now think of how multiple LUNs are currently connected together. This will be achieved with either a Volume Manager (like VxVM), supplied as a separate product, or a native LVM (logical volume manager). All of these tools will spread the "logical" volume across multiple LUNs and will format the LUN with information to enable the volume to be recreated if the LUNs are moved to another host. VxVM achieves this by having a private area on each LUN which contains metadata to rebuild the logical volume. Each LUN can be divided into sub-disks and then recombined into a logical volume, as shown in this diagram.

So a physical LUN from an array may contain a whole or partial segment of a host volume, including LVM metadata. Determining what part, whether all the parts are on this array (and where) is a tricky task - and we're expecting that the transmission protocol (i.e. the fabric) can determine all of this information "on the fly" as it were.

My thought would be - why bother with a fabric-based consolidation tool? Products like VxVM provide a wide set of commands for volume migration, although not automated they certainly make the migration task more simple. I've seen some horrendous VxVM implementations, which would require some pretty impressive logic to be developed in order to understand how to deconstruct and reconstruct a volume. However life is not that simple, and host-based migrations aren't always easy to execute on, so potentially a product would be commercially viable, even if the first implementation was an offline version which couldn't cope with host I/O at the same time.

Funny, what's required sounds a bit like a virtualisation product - perhaps the essence of this is already coded in SVC, UVM or Incipient?

Problems Problems

This week I've been working on two interesting (ish) problems. Well, one more interesting than the other, one a case of the vendor needing to think about requirements more.

Firstly, Tuning Manager (my old software nemesis) strikes again. Within Tuning Manager it is possible to track performance for all LUNs in an array. The gotcha I found this week is that the list of monitored LUNs represents only those allocated to hosts and is a static list which must be refreshed each time an allocation is performed!

This is just lack of thought on behalf of the developers not to provide a "track everything" option so it isn't necessary to keep going into the product, selecting the agent, refreshing the LUN list and tagging them all over again. No wonder allocations can take so long and be fraught with mistakes when Storage Admins have to include in their process the requirement to manually update the tuning product. I'm still waiting for confirmation that there isn't a way to automatically report on all LUNs. If there isn't then a product enhancement will be required to meet what I want. In the meantime, I'll have to ensure things are updated manually. So if you configured Tuning Manager and the LUN list when you first installed an array, have a quick look to see if you're monitoring everything or not.

I'm sure some of you out there will point out, with good reason, why HTnM doesn't automatically scan all LUNs, but from my perspective, I'm never asked by senior management to monitor a performance issue *before* it has occurred, so I always prefer to have monitoring enabled for all devices and all subsystems if it doesn't have an adverse affect on performance.

Second was an issue with the way NTFS works. A number of filesystems on our SQL Server machines show high levels of fragmentation, despite there being plenty of freespace on the volumes in question. This fragmentation issue seems to occur even when a volume is cleared and files are reallocated from scratch.

A quick trawl around the web found me various assertions that NTFS deliberately leaves file clusters between files in order to provide an initial bit of expansion. I'm not sure this is true as I can't find a trusted source to indicate this is standard behaviour. In addition I wonder if it the way in which some products allocate files; for instance if a SQL backup starts to create a backup file it has no real idea how big the file will become. NTFS (I assume) will choose the largest block of freespace available and allocate the file there. If another process allocates a file almost immediately, then it will get allocated just after the first file (which may only be a few clusters in size at this stage). Then the first file gets extended and "leapfrogs" the second file, and so on, producing fragmentation in both files.

I'm not sure if this is what is happening, but if this is the way NTFS is working then it would explain the levels of fragmentation we see (some files have 200,000+ fragments in a 24GB file). In addition, I don't know for definite that the fragmentation is having a detremental impact on performance (these are SAN connected LUNs). Everything is still speculation. I guess I need to do more investigation...