Xen and Starwind

[amirdamadi]

Hello,

Our company was first introduced to Starwind through OnApp a few years ago. We are generally a happy customer however, being on OnApp platform (Xen and KVM - NOT Citrix XenServer), we are having some performance challenges and I thought I'd post some questions here in hopes of getting some feedbacks from other customers of Starwind (or maybe even OnApp):

1) When it comes to Starwind configuration what do you use for:
- Maximum Pending Requests
- Maximum Burst Length
- First Burst Length
- Maximum Receive Data Segment Length
2) What values do you use on the Linux side for the above parameters
3) Do you do any tweaking on sysctl (specifically TCP) settings on the linux side?
4) Do you do any tweaking on the NIC cards on the linux side? i.e using ethtool.
5) Do you do any tweaking on the block devices in linux? i.e. read ahead and max_sectors and etc.
6) What configuration do you use for Multipath?

Please note that our network is primarily on 1gbps gears. and Linux hypervisors are generally Centos 6 (64-bit).

Thank you,
Ali

Any help would be appreciated.

[darklight]

I've done some testing a while ago using XenServer and Starwind works on top of it in both scenarios - dedicated and converged - out of the box. Moreover, I don't think you will be able to squeeze more performance out of your configuration since your network is only 1 GbE which is most probably slower than your storage.
Any chance you could provide us some more information about your current performance (patterns, IOps)?

[anton (staff)]

What was the end of the story? We plan to push Xen and KVM virtual appliances soon and would like to know how "acceptable" the solution would be.