File System Benchmarking Workshop in Santa Cruz
May 19, 2008 – 11:35 am
We’re at Santa Cruz this week at the workshop for file system benchmarking. , chaired by Erez Zadok of StonyBrook University.
The objective of this week is to converge on a set of strategies and recommendations towards more accurate and representative benchmarking of file systems and storage.
Many of the File Systems and I/O benchmarks are represented:
Devaki, Irfan and I will be presenting on the methodologies and strategies for measuring I/O performance with virtualized platforms. Some of the topics we’ll raise are
- Virtualization brings a diverse sets of applications: No single workload footprint on the system
- Workload characteristics are combined when workloads are consolidated onto a single system, resulting in stochastic workload patterns
- Different IO patterns to the same volume, or IO from one app split to different volumes
- Provisioning operations should be considered separate from applications run-time footprint (e.g. Create VM, Power On VM
- Virtual machines are stored in a clustered file system, need to consider locking
- CPU and virtual device emulation can impact storage performance
- System setup can affect performance
- Partition alignment can affect performance
- File system based or raw device mapping possible
- New hardware assist technology should be factored and/or considered
- Proxied I/O protocols are common: e.g. SCSI proxied over NFS within hypervisor
I’ll try to post an update of the workshop outcomes…