Nutanix Archives | Page 2 of 2

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 Postgres, Nutanix, 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, benchmark, nutanix, database, postgres, ahv 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, performance, aos 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, aos, aes, 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 X-Ray, Nutanix, 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, x-ray, resilience 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, hyperconverged, hci, 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, x-ray, video by gary.

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

Detecting and correcting hardware errors using Nutanix Filesystem.

Published: March 15, 2018 (Updated: December 8, 2020) in Nutanix, resilience, corruption by gary.

It’s good to detect corrupted data. It’s even better to transparently repair that data and return the correct data to the user. Here we will demonstrate how Nutanix filesystem detects and corrects corruption. Not all systems are made equally in this regard. The topic of corruption detection and remedy was the focus of this excellent […]

SQL*Server on Nutanix. Force backups to HDD.

Published: March 10, 2016 (Updated: March 10, 2016) in Nutanix, sql-server by gary.

As an experiment, I wanted to (a) Create a HDD only container, and (b) measure the bandwidth I could achieve when backing up the SQL DB. This was performed on a standard hybrid platform with only 4 HDD’s in the node. First create a container, but add the special options “sequential-io-priority-order=DAS-SATA random-io-priority-order=DAS-SATA” which means that […]

SATA on Nutanix. Some experimental data.

Published: June 16, 2015 (Updated: January 3, 2023) in Nutanix, scsi, sata, nutanix, sas by gary. Leave a Comment on SATA on Nutanix. Some experimental data..

The question of why Nutanix uses SATA drive comes up sometimes, especially from customers who have experienced very poor performance using SATA on traditional arrays. I can understand this anxiety. In my time at NetApp we exclusively used SAS or FC-AL drives in performance test work. At the time there was a huge difference in performance between […]

Lord Kelvin Vs the IO blender

Published: October 2, 2014 (Updated: October 2, 2014) in Nutanix by gary.

One of the characteristics of a successful storage system for virtualized environments is that it must handle the IO blender. Put simply, when lots of regular looking workloads are virtualized and presented to the storage, their regularity is lost, and the resulting IO stream starts to look more and more random. This is very similar to […]

Designing a scaleout storage platform.

Published: June 12, 2014 (Updated: March 5, 2017) in Nutanix, nutanix, distributed-systems by gary.

I was speaking to one of our developers the other day, and he pointed me to the following paper: SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services as an example of the general philosophy behind the design of the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS). Although the paper uses examples of both a webserver and a gnutella client, […]