Crucial Paradigm

If you have ever had 3ware cards underperforming before you have probably found out about the storsave profile and how it can effect performance of your RAID array.

Changing your storsave profile can easily be done on the fly without rebooting your server by using the tw_cli utility.

tw_cli /c0/u0 set storsave=balance

Where c0 is the RAID card, and u0 is the array you wish to change the profile for. There are 3 profiles, protect which is the slowest and most secure. Balanced which you should be using if you have a BBU on the RAID card, and then finally performance which doesn’t even use the BBU even if you have one! We set our arrays to balanced when we use a BBU

You can add a hotspare drive to a 3ware controller using the tw_cli utility. Example:

tw_cli /c0 add type=spare disk=14

Where c0 is the controller, and 14 is the port. You can show which ports are being used in which arrays by running:

tw_cli /c0 show

If you have tried to empty any large folders, such as mailbox directories or temporary folders on a linux server you will probably encountered the following error:

-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

An easy way around this is to use the following command (this will remove all files in the folder you run this command):

find . | xargs rm

If you want to delete files with a specific string in them, you can do with the following:

find . -name ‘*string*’ | xargs rm

If you have ever had to deal with failed drives in a RAID array, you will know how painful it can be. We encountered a strange error (UNCONV-DCB) on one drive in a 3ware RAID array, while the 3ware tw_cli utility is quite useful it does not provide any information other than the status of the drive.

Upon doing some research I found you can use smartctl to find out the status of a drive in a RAID array. Something like this:

smartctl -a -d 3ware,0 /dev/twa0 -T verypermissive

Where 3ware,0 is drive 0, and twa0 is 3ware array 0. This outputs something like this:

[root@XXX ~]# smartctl -a -d 3ware,1 /dev/twa0 -T verypermissive
smartctl version 5.37 [i386-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: XXXXX
Serial Number: XXXXX
Firmware Version: XXXX
User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 6
ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2
Local Time is: Tue May 18 11:58:43 2010 EST
SMART support is: Available – device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0×82) Offline data collection activity
was completed without error.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed
without error or no self-test has ever
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: ( 642) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0×7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities: (0×0003) Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability: (0×01) Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 120) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0×000f 119 099 006 Pre-fail Always – 229202478
3 Spin_Up_Time 0×0003 095 095 000 Pre-fail Always – 0
4 Start_Stop_Count 0×0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always – 21
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0×0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always – 2
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0×000f 076 060 030 Pre-fail Always – 82364680704
9 Power_On_Hours 0×0032 082 082 000 Old_age Always – 15937
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0×0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always – 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0×0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always – 21
184 Unknown_Attribute 0×0032 100 100 099 Old_age Always – 0
187 Unknown_Attribute 0×0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 0
188 Unknown_Attribute 0×0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 0
189 Unknown_Attribute 0×003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 0
190 Temperature_Celsius 0×0022 073 061 045 Old_age Always – 538378267
194 Temperature_Celsius 0×0022 027 040 000 Old_age Always – 27 (Lifetime Min/Max 0/17)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0×001a 054 025 000 Old_age Always – 229202478
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0×0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0×0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline – 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0×003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always – 0

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]

SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0×0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

[root@XXXX ~]#

If you have tried installing any software on XenServer you will know that it is not an easy process. This article shows how you can install smartctl on a XenServer server. Smartctl is a great utility to monitor drives and if they have had any errors.

To install run the following:

wget ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/archive.fedoraproject.org/fedora/linux/releases/8/Everything/i386/os/Packages/smartmontools-5.37-7.fc8.i386.rpm
wget ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/archive.fedoraproject.org/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/mailx-8.1.1-46.fc7.i386.rpm
rpm -hiv smartmontools-5.37-7.fc8.i386.rpm mailx-8.1.1-46.fc7.i386.rpm

You now have smartctl installed on XenServer!

3Ware cards do not always make it easy to export drives as JBOD, or for single drives. To get this working it needs to be done through the 3Ware CLI (tw_cli on Linux):

tw_cli maint createunit c0 rsingle p0

Where c0 is the first RAID card in the server, and p0 is the first drive on the controller. You need to run this command for each drive you wish to set to JBOD.

While Intel was releasing their 8-core Xeon processor, AMD has released an 8-core, and a whopping 12-core processor! Introductory processors for the top of the line AMD 6176 SE starts at only US$1386!

The new AMD line of processors use a huge 1944 LGA socket, and can scale up to 4 CPUs in a system. This equates to a total possible cores in a 4 way system to 48 cores.

The high end AMD Operation 6176 SE comes with 12 cores, all operating at 2.3Ghz for a total processing power of 27.6Ghz for a single CPU.

Table of CPUs, including frequency and number of cores: http://www.amd.com/us/products/server/processors/6000-series-platform/Pages/6000-series-model-number-methodology.aspx

You are probably wondering how AMD has built a 12-core processor? They’ve placed 2 6-core CPUs on the same die to bring the total core count to 12.

When building any RAID array you need to consider how many IOPs you require, and what impact different RAID levels have on the number of IOPs. For example if you have 2 drives in RAID 1, for each single IOP you write to the (front-end) RAID 1 array, you need to do 2 IOPs (back-end – one to each drive). Using RAID 5 or 6 can have significant impact on performance, and the number of front-end IOPs to back-end IOPs needs to be taken into consideration.

This is a regular problem we come across while building storage servers, depending on the speed of the drives, the number of drives, storage requirements, and required IOPs for the application we need to make an appropriate RAID level decision.

Back-end Write IOPs Required for every Front End Write:
RAID 0 – 1 IOP
RAID 1 – 2 IOPs
RAID 5 – 4 IOPs
RAID 6 – 6 IOPs
RAID 10 – 2 IOPs

As an example, a RAID 6 array with 6 drives would perform the same number of IOPs a single drive while writing.

If you are trying to find out what exact DNS records your DNS server (or someone else’s DNS servers) are publishing for a specific domain, run the following under any Linux/UNIX system with the ‘host’ command installed:

host -al [domain.com] [nameserver.domain.com]

Where [domain.com] is the domain you wish to query in regards to, and [nameserver.domain.com] is the name server you wish to query.

The quick easy way to install dig on CentOS is:

yum install bind-utils -y