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Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card Product Notes |
This document contains late-breaking information about the Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe card from Oracle. Read this document first. This document is written for technicians, system administrators, authorized service providers (ASPs), and users who have advanced experience troubleshooting and replacing hardware.
For specific installation instructions, see your system installation guide. For late-breaking information about installation and use of the Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe card on your server, see the most recent version of the server product notes.
This section describes servers that support the Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe card. For detailed information about using this card with your server, see the product notes for your server, available at:
http://www.oracle.com/documentation
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* Note - The Sun Storage 7120 and the M series servers only support cards with part numbers: 511-1500-xx. |
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The following tables describe which combinations of operating systems and servers are supported for use with the Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe card. Check marks indicate that combination is supported.
The Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe card runs with the minimum required host firmware listed below. However, to take advantange of the extended ESM life feature, use the recommended system software versions listed for your system. For more information, see ESM Expected Life Extended.
| Note - The Sun Fire X4470 and Sun Fire X4470 M2 servers do not support ESM monitoring. See the server product notes for manual ESM monitoring instructions for these systems. |
The server, firmware, and OS combinations that support using the card as a boot device are described in the following table.
Download and install the following performance patch on your Oracle Solaris host:
Available for download from the following web site:
http://www.oracle.com/us/support/index.html
| Note - To enable maximum throughput from the MPT driver, add mpt_doneq_thread_n_prop=8; to /kernel/drv/mpt.conf and reboot the system. |
| Note - Use Management Pack 2.2 for updating card firmware, if possible. |
The Oracle Hardware Management Pack 2.1 (formerly known as Sun Server Hardware Management Pack) contains Oracle Server Management Agents, Oracle Hardware SNMP Plugins, and Oracle Server CLI Tools. Use this tool to update firmare on your Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe card.
Supporting documentation is available at: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/documentation/sys-mgmt-networking-190072.html
Download software and patches from My Oracle Support:
Once you have installed the Management Pack 2.1 software, download and install the patch required for your OS. For Oracle Solaris:
Patch Request 13175939 Oracle Hardware Management Pack 2.1 - Solaris
ESMs were originally assigned 2 year lifespans. Update your system host software to increase the ESM monitoring lifespan to 3 or 4 years, depending on your host. See Required Host Software for system host software versions.
| Note - When you replace an ESM, you must reset the counter to 0. For instructions, see the “Monitoring ESM Lifespan” section in the Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card User’s Guide. |
You must properly align the FMods before using the card.
Solid state flash devices have block alignments typically aligned on 4-Kbyte boundaries, not the 512-byte boundaries of conventional disks. To maximize performance, partitions need to be aligned on 4-Kbyte boundaries. For directions on aligning the FMods, see the Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe User’s Guide.
The following best practices are recommended in order to achieve optimal performance of ZFS on the F5100 storage array and F20 Flash Accelerator PCIe Card.
Both the F20 and F5100 can be used as primary low-latency storage. In these cases it is recommended to make the necessary changes to sd.conf to ensure the device is properly treated as one with a non-volatile backed cache. This will improve latency of commit operations (such as regular O_DSYNC writes, NFS commits, and iSCSI operations).
ZFS sends cache flushes before completing commit operations. This is to instruct the storage to ensure the safety of previously completed I/O operations. The F5100 and F20 devices have built-in supercapacitors that provide enough power to ensure time to flush all device caches in the event of a power failure. Thus we need to instruct the F5100 and F20 to ignore these flushes. This setting can be changed only for F5100 and F20 devices by altering the /kernel/drv/sd.conf file.
The following is the entry that should be added (all one line, no line breaks):
sd-config-list = “ATA MARVELL SD88SA02”,”throttle-max:32, disksort:false, cache-nonvolatile:true”;
In the above statement, spacing is absolutely critical; an extra or omitted space in the initial “ATA...” string will result in the directive having no impact.
Alternatively, you can choose to set zfs_nocacheflush on a system-wide basis via adding the following parameter to the /etc/system file. If you have devices in ZFS pools that have caches which are not protected with non-volatile memory, such as a SCSI disk, this is not recommended.
set zfs:zfs_nocacheflush = 1
Consider using LUNs or low latency disk managed by a controller with persistent memory for the ZFS intent log if available. This option can be considered more cost effective than using flash for low latency commits. The size of the log devices must only be enough to hold 10 seconds of maximum write throughput. Examples would include a storage array based lun, or a disk fronted by an HBA with a battery protected write cache.
If no such device is available, segment a separate pool of F5100 FMods or F20 DOMs and specify as the log device.
The F20 supports 4 independent DOMs (Disks on Modules) of 24GB. It˘2019s ideal to use some DOMs as ZFS log devices to reduce the commit latency particularly if used in an NFS server. 1 single DOM of an F20 used as a ZFS log device will reduce latency of single lightly threaded operation by an order of magnitude (~10X). More F20 DOMs can be stripped together to achieved higher throughput for large amount of synchronous operation for instance when ZFS is exporting iSCSI luns.
Similarly, if using an F5100 both as primary storage and the ZFS log device, it is recommended to segment a few of the flash modules (FMods) for use as the log device. The FMods, like the DOMs, make excellent logging devices when used in this fashion.
An F20 DOM or F5100 FMOD cxtxdx can be added as a ZFS log device (man zpool(1M)) with:
zpool add pool log cxtxdx
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Caution - Be very careful with zpool add commands. Mistakenly adding a log device as a normal pool device is a mistake that will require you to destroy and restore the pool from scratch. |
Some of the F20 DOMs / F5100 FMODs not used as log devices can also be used as second level cache devices to both offload IOPS from primary disk storage and to improve read latency for commonly used data recently evicted from the level one ARC cache. In that case one can do this:
zpool add pool cache cxtxdx
If you are running the latest S10 Patches or S11, this step is no longer necessary. ZFS now runs as a 4k-native file system F20 and F5100 devices. Enabling Metadata compression (default Solaris setting) is fine, and has run better test cases.
Flash products achieve optimal performance when subjected to I/O requests that are restricted in size and alignment to multiples of 4k. For this reason, it is recommended to disable metadata compression. Disable metadata compression by adding the following entry to /etc/system:
set zfs:zfs_mdcomp_disable = 1
Large performance gains can be realized by reducing the default recordsize used by ZFS, particularly when running database workloads. The ZFS recordsize should match the database recordsize. Note that the recordsize setting must be in place prior to when data is loaded on zfs. Additional reading on this subject may be found at http://blogs.sun.com/roch/entry/tuning_zfs_recordsize. The following example illustrates how to set the recordsize to 16k:
zfs set recordsize=16k mypool/myfs
This section describes hardware, firmware, and software issues known to exist at this release of Oracle’s Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe card.
The label on the card faceplate might read “SuperCap” instead of “ESM”.
The printed Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Getting Started Guide (820-7264-11) that ships in the box with the card contains out of date URLs. For valid URLs, see the current Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Getting Started Guide (E29800-01) online at:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19682-01/index.html
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Copyright |
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