Hello,

I am working on configuring a 2-node active-passive cluster (hostnames node1 
and node2) to provide high-availability to NFS and Samba servers. Both of these 
nodes are VMs using the KVM hypervisor and libvirt for management. The VM hosts 
and the guests (node1 and node2) are all running Ubuntu 10.04.3 Server. The 
storage backend for the DRBD device is a software RAID1 on the vm host. I am 
using the virtio block drivers and cache=none for accessing the disks in the 
virtual machine (see attached diagram). The DRBD block device is in 
single-primary mode and contains an ext3 filesystem. I am finding that the disk 
has very poor performance on reads and writes, orders of magnitude below what a 
bare drive has inside of the VM (also using virtio). For example, in one test 
using iozone the average read throughput was 2942 MB/s for the bare drive in 
the VM, yet the DRBD device was 235 MB/s. Running the same test on a DRBD 
device in the VM without the RAID (just a bare drive) was 1047 MB/s.


Writes have even worse performance (though I expect to see some decrease of 
course because of the DRBD replication): 1160 MB/s for the bare drive in the 
VM, 24 MB/s for the DRBD+RAID device, and 101 MB/s for the DRBD bare drive.


Do you have any suggestions on how I can improve performance, especially read 
performance, for the DRBD block device inside the VM?


Thanks,


Andrew

<<attachment: drbd-kvm.png>>

_______________________________________________
drbd-user mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.linbit.com/mailman/listinfo/drbd-user

Reply via email to