vscsiStats during an SAP Client Copy

I gathered some vscsiStats during an SAP ECC 6.0 Client 0 copy this morning.  I did this because I wanted to not only see how my storage subsystem was handling the load, but also to test out the new version of the Excel Macro Matt and I had worked on.

This is a fresh Oracle based SAP ECC 6.0 install. There are already 2 IDES clients in place and this client copy will be for a BPI client for the summer.  Build details:

• Windows 2003 x64
• 16gig ram
• 60gig C, 500gig data partition
• Quad Xeon 2.9Ghz

All running on ESX 4.0 on a Sun Blade x6250 in a 6000 chassis, storage provided by a Sun 7410C.

As soon as  I had the job scheduled I started gathering vscsiStats on the box. I collected stats for the length of time it took for the client copy to complete; 110 minutes.

The HTML output of the Excel Macro is viewable as index4558 . Note that unlike the HTML original you can’t click on anything in the PDF.

Starting to process the data. In the first chart you can see that the mean block size is 8k

The latency is generally  between 5msec and 15msec. Keep in mind this is a combination of read and write. I think my read cache is keeping up but once in a while the writes are overrunning write cache. The storage has 200GB read cache per head and 3x 18GB write SSDs per storage pool.

At the same time I was collecting vscsiStats, I had Sun Storage Analytics open. Overall the client copy moved about 50GB of data in 110 minutes. In this view of Sun Analytics you can see the effect of the client copy with the highlighted peak at 10,341 NFSv3 Ops per sec

Overall in this graph you can see the impact of the client copy on storage, I’ve added an arrow to the time when I started the client copy job. This screenshot does not go out to the end of the copy, but traffic quiets right down when the job finished

Overall in the 110 minutes of the client copy, 30GB written, 18GB read

New vscsiStats Excel Macro

I wrote an Excel Macro to process vscsiStats data and turn it into pretty charts & graphs. I shared that macro with my friend Matt Kelliher and after showing him how to use it, he suggested and made a modification to it. The latest version will still process the data and create charts but then it will also export the charts as PNG, create an HTML file and put thumbnails of the charts in. You can then click on any of the charts for a full-screen view. Handy method of presenting the data in a concise format.

Let me know what you think of the file, you may download a copy here. You are welcome to download and use this macro but please leave the comments at the top (feel free to buy us a beer or two too)

This macro has been tested in Excel 2007 and 2010 beta. I must say though,  it runs much more slowly in these than in 2003.

Note: SAVE your spreadsheet first before running this version of the macro, it uses the current save location as the starting point for creating the HTML and saving the images.