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Solaris Volume Manager Performance Best Practices

Compelling new features such as soft partitioning and automatic device relocation make the Solaris Volume Manager software a viable candidate for storage management needs. Solaris Volume Manager software features enhance storage management capabilities beyond what is handled by intelligent storage arrays with hardware RAID. Now Solaris Volume Manager software is integrated with the Solaris Operating Environment (Solaris OE) and does not require additional license fees. This article provides specific Solaris Volume Manager tips for system, storage, and database administrators who want get the most of Solaris Volume Manager software in their data centers. This article targets an intermediate audience.
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Compelling new features such as soft partitioning and automatic device relocation make the Solaris™ Volume Manager software a viable candidate for your storage management needs. Solaris Volume Manager features enhance storage management capabilities beyond what is handled by intelligent storage arrays with hardware RAID.

Beginning with the Solaris™ 9 Operating Environment (OE), Solaris Volume Manager software is integrated with the Solaris OE and does not require additional license fees. Simply install the Solaris 9 OE and begin using Solaris Volume Manager software. The new Solaris Volume Manager features, coupled with the improved distribution model, make Solaris Volume Manager software a natural choice.

The Strategic Applications Engineering (SAE) group within Sun Microsystems performs industry standard benchmarks. Our Benchmarking activity enables us to characterize Solaris Volume Manager performance, and to develop best practice recommendations to best serve our customers. This article provides some of those recommendations for Solaris Volume Manager performance best practices.

This article is intended for system, storage, and database administrators.

The topics in this article include:

  • "Solaris Volume Manager Performance Overview"

  • "Solaris Volume Manager Striping Considerations"

  • "Software RAID Considerations"

  • "Multipathing"

  • "Solaris Volume Manager Performance With UFS File Systems and Oracle"

  • "Administration Tips"

Solaris Volume Manager Performance Overview

This section explains how Solaris Volume Manager software performs with respect to its competition. To compare performance with Veritas VxVM 3.5, a benchmark was run that submits random 8-Kbyte reads through multiple threads to simulate an online transaction processing (OLTP) environment.

Solaris Volume Manager software and VxVM performance were tested using volumes created on nine Sun StorEdge™ T3 arrays using RAID 0 LUNs. Two concatenated volumes per LUN were created for a total of 18 volumes. Starting with 8 threads directed at each volume, additional threads were added until there were 16 random threads per volume. Performance results are shown in FIGURE 1.

Figure 1FIGURE 1 Solaris Volume Manager Software and VxVM Performance With 8-Kbyte I/O

Solaris Volume Manager software and Veritas performance are nearly the same. System CPU utilization at 35,000 I/O per second is only 14% for Solaris Volume Manager software and 15% for Veritas. This leaves plenty of CPU resources to achieve good application performance.

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