Dell MD3620I, MD3600I owner manual Load Balancing

Ownership can later be modified to balance workload according to actual usage. If virtual disk ownership is not manually balanced, it is possible for one controller to have the majority of the work, while the other controller is idle. Limit the number of virtual disks in a disk group. If multiple virtual disks are in a disk group, consider:

•The impact each virtual disk has on other virtual disks in the same disk group.

•The patterns of usage for each virtual disk.

•Different virtual disks have higher usage at different times of day.

Load Balancing

A load balance policy is used to determine which path is used to process I/O. Multiple options for setting the load balance policies let you optimize I/O performance when mixed host interfaces are configured.

You can choose one of these load balance policies to optimize I/O performance:

•Round-robin with subset—The round-robin with subset I/O load balance policy routes I/O requests, in rotation, to each available data path to the RAID controller module that owns the virtual disks. This policy treats all paths to the RAID controller module that owns the virtual disk equally for I/O activity. Paths to the secondary RAID controller module are ignored until ownership changes. The basic assumption for the round-robin policy is that the data paths are equal. With mixed host support, the data paths might have different bandwidths or different data transfer speeds.

•Least queue depth with subset—The least queue depth with subset policy is also known as the least I/Os or least requests policy. This policy routes the next I/O request to a data path that has the least outstanding I/O requests queued. For this policy, an I/O request is simply a command in the queue. The type of command or the number of blocks that are associated with the command are not considered.The least queue depth with subset policy treats large block requests and small block requests equally. The data path selected is one of the paths in the path group of the RAID controller module that owns the virtual disk.

56

Planning: MD3600i Series Storage Array Terms and Concepts