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. Here’s how to do it.

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Why does my SSD not issue 1MB IO’s?

First things First

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CDC9762-smd-drive.jpg
CDC 9762 SMD disk drive from 1974

Why do we tend to use 1MB IO sizes for throughput benchmarking?

To achieve the maximum throughput on a storage device, we will usually use a large IO size to maximize the amount of data is transferred per IO request. The idea is to make the ratio of data-transfers to IO requests as large as possible to reduce the CPU overhead of the actual IO request so we can get as close to the device bandwidth as possible. To take advantage of and pre-fetching, and to reduce the need for head movement in rotational devices, a sequential pattern is used.

For historical reasons, many storage testers will use a 1MB IO size for sequential testing. A typical fio command line might look like something this.

fio --name=read --bs=1m --direct=1 --filename=/dev/sda
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How to identify SSD types and measure performance.

Thomas Springer / CC0
Generic SSD Internal Layout

The real-world achievable SSD performance will vary depending on factors like IO size, queue depth and even CPU clock speed. It’s useful to know what the SSD is capable of delivering in the actual environment in which it’s used. I always start by looking at the performance claimed by the manufacturer. I use these figures to bound what is achievable. In other words, treat the manufacturer specs as “this device will go no faster than…”.


Identify SSD

Start by identifying the exact SSD type by using lsscsi. Note that the disks we are going to test are connected by ATA transport type, therefore the maximum queue depth that each device will support is 32.

# lsscsi 
[1:0:0:0] cd/dvd QEMU QEMU DVD-ROM 2.5+ /dev/sr0
[2:0:0:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG MZ7LM1T9 404Q /dev/sda
[2:0:1:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG MZ7LM1T9 404Q /dev/sdb
[2:0:2:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG MZ7LM1T9 404Q /dev/sdc
[2:0:3:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG MZ7LM1T9 404Q /dev/

The marketing name for these Samsung SSD’s is “SSD 850 EVO 2.5″ SATA III 1TB

Identify device specs

The spec sheet for this ssd claims the following performance characteristics.

Workload (Max)SpecMeasured
Sequential Read (QD=8)540 MB/s534
Sequential Write (QD=8)520 MB/s515
Read IOPS 4KB (QD=32)98,00080,00
Write IOPS 4KB (QD=32)90,00067,000
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Quick & Dirty Prometheus on OS-X

How to install Prometheus on OS-X

Install prometheus

  • Download the compiled prometheus binaries from prometheus.io
  • Unzip the binary and cd into the directory.
  • Run the prometheus binary, from the command line, it will listen on port 9090
$ cd /Users/gary.little/Downloads/prometheus-2.16.0-rc.0.darwin-amd64
$ ./prometheus
  • From a local browser, point to localhost:9090
prometheus web-ui

Add a collector/scraper to monitor the OS

Prometheus itself does not do much apart from monitor itself, to do anything useful we have to add a scraper/exporter module. The easiest thing to do is add the scraper to monitor OS-X itself. As in Linux the OS exporter is simply called “node exporter”.

Start by downloading the pre-compiled darwin node exporter from prometheus.io

  • Unzip the tar.gz
  • cd into the directory
  • run the node exporter
$ cd /Users/gary.little/Downloads/node_exporter-0.18.1.darwin-amd64
$ ./node_exporter
 INFO[0000] Starting node_exporter (version=0.18.1, branch=HEAD, revision=3db77732e925c08f675d7404a8c46466b2ece83e)  source="node_exporter.go:156"
 INFO[0000] Build context (go=go1.11.10, user=root@4a30727bb68c, date=20190604-16:47:36)  source="node_exporter.go:157"
 INFO[0000] Enabled collectors:                           source="node_exporter.go:97"
 INFO[0000]  - boottime                                   source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - cpu                                        source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - diskstats                                  source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - filesystem                                 source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - loadavg                                    source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - meminfo                                    source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - netdev                                     source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - textfile                                   source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - time                                       source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000] Listening on :9100                            source="node_exporter.go:170""
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SQL Server uses only one NUMA Node with HammerDB

Some versions of HammerDB (e.g. 3.2) may induce imbalanced NUMA utilization with SQL Server.

This can easily be observed with Resource monitor. When NUMA imbalance occurs one of the NUMA nodes will show much larger utilization than the other. E.g.

Imbalanced NUMA usage by SQL Server.

The cause and fix is well documented on this blog. In short HammerDB issues a short lived connection, for every persistent connection. This causes the SQL Server Round-robin allocation to send all the persistent worker threads to a single NUMA Node! To resolve this issue, simply comment out line #212 in the driver script.

Comment out this line to work-around the HammerDB NUMA imbalance problem.

If successful you will immediately see that the NUMA nodes are more balanced. Whether this results in more/better performance will depend on exactly where the bottleneck is.

Balanced NUMA usage by SQL Server

How to run vertica vioperf tool

The vertica vioperf tool is used to determine whether the storage you are planning on using is fast enough to feed the vertica database. When I initially ran the tool, the IO performance reported by the tool and confirmed by iostat was much lower than I expected for the storage device (a 6Gbit SATA device capable of around 500MB/s read and write).

The vioperf tool runs on a linux host or VM and can be pointed at any filesystem just like fio or vdbench

Simple execution of vioperf writing to the location /vertica

vioperf --thread-count=8 --duration=120s  /vertica

Working Set Size

Unlike traditional IO generators vioperf does not allow you to specify the working-set size. The amount of data written is simply 1MB* Achieved IO rate * runtime. So, fast storage with long run-times will need a lot of capacity otherwise the tool simply fills the partition and crashes!

Measurement and goodness

The primary metric is MB/s Per-Core. The idea is that you give 1 Thread per core in the system, though there is nothing stopping you from using whatever –thread-count value you like.

Although the measure is throughput, the primary metric of (Throughput/Core) does not improve just by giving lots of concurrency. Concurrency is generated purely by the number of threads and since the measure of goodness is Throughput/Core (or per thread) it’s not possible to simply create throughput from concurrency alone.

Throughput compared to FIo

Compared to fio the reported throughput is lower for the same device and same degree of concurrency. Vertica continually writes, and extends the files so there is some filesystem work going on whereas fio is typically overwriting an existing file. If you observe iostat during the vioperf run you will see that the IO size to disk is different than what an fio run will generate. Again this is due to the fact that vioperf is continually extending the file(s) being written and so it needs to update filesystem metadata quite frequently. These small metadata updates skew the average IO size lower.

fio with 1MB IO and 1 thread

Notice the avgrq size is 1024 blocks (512KB) which is the maximum transfer size that this drive supports.

 fio --filename=/samsung/vertica/file --size=5g --bs=1m --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=1 --rw=write --direct=1 --name=samsung --create_on_open=0


avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           4.16    0.00    3.40    0.00    0.00   92.43

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
sdb               0.00     0.00    0.00  920.00     0.00 471040.00  1024.00     1.40    1.53    0.00    1.53   1.02  93.80

Vertica IOstat 1 thread

Firstly we see that iostat reports much lower disk throughput than what we achieved with fio for the same offered workload (1MB IO size with 1 outstanding IO (1 thread).

Also notice that that although vioperf issues 1MB IO sizes (which we can see from strace) iostat does not report the same 1024 block transfers as we see when we run iostat during an fio run (as above).

In the vioperf case the small metadata writes that are needed to continually extend the file cause a average IO size than than overwriting an existing file. Perhaps that is the cause of the lower performance?

./vioperf --duration=300s --thread-count=1 /samsung/vertica

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           8.77    0.13    2.38    5.26    0.00   83.46

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
sdb               0.00     0.00    0.00  627.00     0.00 223232.00   712.06     1.02    1.63    0.00    1.63   0.69  43.20
strace -f ./vioperf --duration=300s --thread-count=1 --disable-crc /samsung/vertica
...
[pid  1350] write(6, "v\230\242Q\357\250|\212\256+}\224\270\256\273\\\366k\210\320\\\330z[\26[\6&\351W%D"..., 1048576) = 1048576
[pid  1350] write(6, "B\2\224\36\250\"\346\241\0\241\361\220\242,\207\231.\244\330\3453\206'\320$Y7\327|5\204b"..., 1048576) = 1048576
[pid  1350] write(6, "\346r\341{u\37N\254.\325M'\255?\302Q?T_X\230Q\301\311\5\236\242\33\1)4'"..., 1048576) = 1048576
[pid  1350] write(6, "\5\314\335\264\364L\254x\27\346\3251\236\312\2075d\16\300\245>\256mU\343\346\373\17'\232\250n"..., 1048576) = 1048576
[pid  1350] write(6, "\272NKs\360\243\332@/\333\276\2648\255\v\243\332\235\275&\261\37\371\302<\275\266\331\357\203|\6"..., 1048576) = 1048576
[pid  1350] write(6, "v\230\242Q\357\250|\212\256+}\224\270\256\273\\\366k\210\320\\\330z[\26[\6&\351W%D"..., 1048576) = 1048576
...

However, look closely and you will notice that the %user is higher than fio for a lower IO rate AND the disk is not 100% busy. That seems odd.

./vioperf --duration=300s --thread-count=1 /samsung/vertica

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           8.77    0.13    2.38    5.26    0.00   83.46

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
sdb               0.00     0.00    0.00  627.00     0.00 223232.00   712.06     1.02    1.63    0.00    1.63   0.69  43.20

vioperf with –disable-crc

Finally we disable the crc checking (which vioperf does by default) to get a higher throughput more similar to what we see with fio.

It turns out that the lower performance was not due to the smaller IO sizes (and additonal filesystem work) but was caused the CRC checking that the tool does to simulate the vertica application.

 ./vioperf --duration=300s --thread-count=1 --disable-crc /samsung/vertica

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           8.77    0.13    2.38    5.26    0.00   83.46

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
sdb               0.00     0.00    0.00  627.00     0.00 223232.00   712.06     1.02    1.63    0.00    1.63   0.69  43.20

Duplicate IP issues with Linux and virtual machine cloning.

TL;DR – Some modern Linux distributions use a newer method of identification which, when combined with DHCP can result in duplicate IP addresses when cloning VMs, even when the VMs have unique MAC addresses.

To resolve, do the following ( remove file, run the systemd-machine-id-setup command, reboot):

# rm /etc/machine-id
# systemd-machine-id-setup
# reboot

When hypervisor management tools make clones of virtual machines, the tools usually make sure to create a unique MAC address for every clone. Combined with DHCP, this is normally enough to boot the clones and have them receive a unique IP. Recently, when I cloned several Bitnami guest VMs which are based on Debian, I started to get duplicate IP addresses on the clones. The issue can be resolved manually by following the above procedure.

To create a VM template to clone from which will generate a new machine-id for very clone, simply create an empty /etc/machine-id file (do not rm the file, otherwise the machine-id will not be generated)

# echo "" |  tee /etc/machine-id 

The machine-id man page is a well written explanation of the implementation and motivation.

View from Nutanix storage during Postgres DB benchmark

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 is small (50% the size of the Linux RAM) – the data is mostly cached inside the guest, and so most reads do not hit storage. As a result we only see writes going to the DB files.

Additionally, we see that database datafile writes the arrive in a bursty fashion, and that these write bursts are more intense (~10x) than the log file writes.

Charts from Prometheus/Grafana showing IO rates seen from the perspective of the Linux guest VM

Despite the database flushes ocurring in bursts with a decent amount of concurrency the Nutanix CVM provides an average of 1.5ms write response time.

From the Nutanix CVM port 2009 handler, we can access the individual vdisk statistics. In this particular case vDisk 45269 is the data file disk, and 40043 is the database transaction log disk.

Datafile writes completed in 1.5millisecond average – despite deep queues during burst

The vdisk categorizer correctly identifies the database datafile write pattern as highly random.

Writes to the datbase datafiles are almost entirely random

As a result, the writes are passed into the replicated oplog

The burst of writes hits the oplog as expected

Meanwhile the log writes are categorized as mostly sequential, which is expected for a database log file workload.

Meanwhile, log file writes are mostly categorized as sequential.

Even though the log writes are sequential, they are low-concurrency and small size (looks like mostly 16K-32K). This write pattern is also a good candidate for oplog.

These low-concurrency log writes also hit oplog

Benchmarking with Postgres PT2

In this example we run pgbench with a scale factor of 1000 which equates to a database size of around 15GB. The linux VM has 32G RAM, so we don’t expect to see many reads.

Using prometheus with the Linux node exporter we can see the disk IO pattern from pgbench. As expected the write pattern to the log disk (sda) is quite constant, while the write pattern to the database files (sdb) is bursty.

pgbench with DB size 50% of Linux buffer cache.

I had to tune the parameter checkpoint_completion_target from 0.5 to 0.9 otherwise the SCSI stack became overwhelmed during checkpoints, and caused log-writes to stall.

default pgbench – notice the sharp drop in log-writes before tuning.


Benchmarking with Postgres PT1

Image By Daniel Lundin

In this example, we use Postgres and the pgbench workload generator to drive some load in a virtual machine.  Assume a Linux virtual machine that has Postgres installed. Specifically using a Bitnami virtual appliance.

  • Once the VM has been started, connect to the console
  • Allow access to postgres port 5432 – which is the postgres DB port or allow ssh
$ sudo ufw allow 5432
  • Note the postgres user password (cat ./bitnami_credentials)
  •  Login to psql from the console or ssh
psql -U postgres
  • Optionally change password (the password prompted is the one from bitnami_credentials for the postgres database user).
psql -U postgres
postgres=# alter user postgres with password 'NEW_PASSWORD';
postgresl=# \q
  • Create a DB to run the pgbench workload.  In this case I name the db pgbench-sf10 for “Scale Factor 10”.  Scale Factors are how the size of the database is determined.
$ sudo -u postgres createdb pgbench-sf10
  • Initialise the DB with data ready to run the benchmark.  The “createdb” step just creates an empty schema.
    • -i means “initialize”
    • -s means “scale factor” e.g. 10
    • pgbench-sf10 is the database schema to use.  We use the one just created pgbench-sf10
$ sudo -u postgres pgbench -i -s 10 pgbench-sf10
  • Noe run a workload against the DB schema called pgbench-sf10
$ sudo -u postgres pgbench pgbench-sf10

The workload pattern, and load on the system will vary greatly depending on the scale factor.  

Scale-Factor        Working Set Size


1                                   23M
10                                157M
100                             1.7GB
1000                          15GB
2500                          37GB
5000                         74GB
10000                       147GB