Nutanix Archives | n0derunner

Advanced X-Ray: reducing runtime by re-using VMs.

Published: October 5, 2020 (Updated: October 6, 2020) in X-Ray, benchmarking, xray by gary. Leave a Comment on Advanced X-Ray: reducing runtime by re-using VMs..

How to speed up your X-ray benchmark development cycle by re-using/re-cycling benchmark VMs and more importantly data-sets.

How to performance test Nutanix on AWS with X-ray

Published: August 18, 2020 (Updated: August 20, 2020) in X-Ray, aws, nutanix, xray by gary. Leave a Comment on How to performance test Nutanix on AWS with X-ray.

End to End Creation of a Nutanix Cluster on AWS and Running X-Ray

Nutanix X-Ray video Series

Published: August 10, 2020 (Updated: August 10, 2020) in Workloads & Benchmarks, X-Ray, video, xray by gary. Leave a Comment on Nutanix X-Ray video Series.

A series of videos showing how to install, run, modify and analyze HCI clusters with the Nutanix X-ray tool

How to download and Install Nutanix X-ray on an AHV cluster

Published: August 10, 2020 (Updated: August 10, 2020) in X-Ray, nutanix, x-ray by gary. Leave a Comment on How to download and Install Nutanix X-ray on an AHV cluster.

How to measure database scaling & density on Nutanix HCI platform.

Published: March 27, 2020 (Updated: March 29, 2020) in Nutanix, database, density, postgres, scaling by gary. Leave a Comment on How to measure database scaling & density on Nutanix HCI platform..

How can database density be measured? How does database performance behave as more DBs are consolidated? What impact does running the CVM have on available host resources? tl;dr The cluster was able to achieve ~90% of the theoretical maximum. CVM overhead was 5% for this workload. Experiment setup The goal was to establish how database […]

How to run vdbench benchmark on any HCI with X-Ray

Published: March 23, 2020 (Updated: October 8, 2020) in X-Ray, vdbench, x-ray by gary. Leave a Comment on How to run vdbench benchmark on any HCI with X-Ray.

Many storage performance testers are familiar with vdbench, and wish to use it to test Hyper-Converged (HCI) performance. To accurately performance test HCI you need to deploy workloads on all HCI nodes. However, deploying multiple VMs and coordinating vdbench can be tricky, so with X-ray we provide an easy way to run vdbench at scale. […]

Impact of Data locality on DB workloads.

Published: July 23, 2019 (Updated: October 8, 2020) in Nutanix, nutanix, postgres by gary.

Do database workloads benefit from data locality?

View from Nutanix storage during Postgres DB benchmark

Published: June 28, 2019 (Updated: March 15, 2020) in Nutanix, Postgres, database, postgres by gary.

Following on from the previous [1] [2] experiments with Postgres & pgbench. A quick look at how the workload is seen from the Nutanix CVM. The Linux VM running postgres has two virtual disks: One is taking transaction log writes. The other is doing reads and writes from the main datafiles. Since the database size […]

Install a bitnami image to Nutanix AHV cluster.

Published: June 28, 2019 (Updated: June 28, 2019) in Nutanix, ahv, benchmark, database, nutanix, postgres by gary.

One of the nice things about using public cloud is the ability to use pre-canned application virtual appliances created by companies like Bitnami. We can use these same appliance images on Nutanix AHV to easily do a Postgres database benchmark Step 1. Get the bitnami image wget https://bitnami.com/redirect/to/587231/bitnami-postgresql-11.3-0-r56-linux-debian-9-x86_64.zip Step 2. Unzip the file and convert […]

Database compression on Nutanix

Published: February 17, 2019 (Updated: October 8, 2020) in Nutanix by gary.

DB Compression

Nutanix AES: Performance By Example PT2

Published: December 18, 2018 (Updated: January 2, 2019) in Nutanix, aes, aos, performance by gary.

How to improve large DB read performance by 2X Nutanix AOS 5.10 ships with a feature called Autonomous Extent Store (AES). AES effectively provides Metadata Locality to complement the existing data locality that has always existed. For large datasets (e.g. a 10TB database with 20% hot data) we observe a 2X improvement in throughput for random […]

Nutanix AES: Performance By Example.

Published: December 17, 2018 (Updated: January 23, 2019) in Nutanix, aes, aos, performance by gary.

How to reduce database restore time by 50% During .Next 2018 in London, Nutanix announced performance improvements in the core-datapath said to give up to 2X performance improvements. Here’s a real-world example of that improvement in practice. I am using X-Ray to simulate a 1TB data restore into an existing database. Specifically the IO sizes […]

How scalable is my Nutanix cluster really?

Published: November 20, 2018 (Updated: March 15, 2020) in Nutanix, modeling, USL by gary.

In a previous post I showed a chart which plots concurrency [X-axis] against throughput (IOPS) on the Y-Axis. Here is that plot again: Experienced performance chart ogglers will notice the familiar pattern of Littles Law, whereby throughput (X) rises quickly as concurrency (N) is increased. As we follow the chart to the right, the slope flattens […]

Working with fio “distribution /pereto” parameter

Published: November 12, 2018 (Updated: January 4, 2019) in Nutanix, X-Ray, fio, modeling by gary.

The fio Pareto parameter allows us to create a workload, which references a very large dataset, but specify a hotspot for the access pattern. Here’s an example using the same setup as the ILM experiment, but using a Pareto value of 0:8. My fio file looks like this.. [global] ioengine=libaio direct=1 time_based norandommap random_distribution=pareto:0.8 The […]

You are here. The art of HCI performance testing

Published: November 9, 2018 (Updated: March 15, 2020) in Nutanix by gary.

At some point potential Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) users want to know – “How fast does this thing go?”. The real question is “how do we measure that?”. The simplest test is to run a single VM, with a single disk and issue a single IO at a time. We see often see this sort of […]

X-Ray scenario to demonstrate Nutanix ILM behavior.

Published: October 25, 2018 (Updated: July 13, 2019) in X-Ray, nutanix, x-ray by gary.

Specifically a customer wanted to see how performance changes (and how quickly) as data moves from HDD to SSD automatically as data is accessed. The access pattern is 100% random across the entire disk. In a hybrid Flash/HDD system – “cold” data (i.e. data that has not been accessed for a long time) is moved […]

HCI Performance testing made easy (Part 4)

Published: September 27, 2018 (Updated: October 4, 2018) in X-Ray, nutanix, resilience, x-ray by gary.

What happens when power is lost to all nodes of a HCI Cluster? Ever wondered what happens when all power is simultaneously lost on a HCI cluster? One of the core principles of cloud design is that components are expected to fail, but the cluster as a whole should stay “up”. We wanted to […]

HCI Performance testing made easy (Part 2)

Published: September 11, 2018 (Updated: July 31, 2020) in X-Ray, hci, hyperconverged, video, x-ray by gary.

A simple benchmark for Random Reads, Random Writes, Sequential Reads, Sequential Writes.

HCI Performance testing made easy (Part 1)

Published: September 7, 2018 (Updated: July 31, 2020) in X-Ray, hci, hyperconverged, video, x-ray by gary.

How to create a customized performance test using X-ray.