Category Archives: QoS

Confusing Mellanox Windows PerfMon Counters

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Introduction

So you start out doing SMB Direct. Maybe you’re doing RoCE, if so there’s a good chance you’ll be using the excellent Mellanox cards. You studied hard, read a lot and put some real effort into setting it up. The SMB Direct / DCB configuration is how you think it should be and things are working as expected.

Curious as you are you want to find out if you can see Priority Flow Control work. Well, the easiest way to do so is by using the Windows Performance Monitor counters that Mellanox provides.

Confusing Mellanox Windows PerfMon Counters

So you take your first look at the Mellanox Adaptor QoS Perfmon counters for ConnectX series for SMB Direct (RDMA) traffic. When you want to see what’s happening in regards to pause frames that have been sent and received and what pause duration was requested from the receiving hop (or received from the sending hop) you can get confused. The naming is a bit counter intuitive.

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The Rcv Pause duration is not the duration requested by the pause frames the host received, but by the pause frames that host sent. Likewise, the Sent Pause duration is not the duration requested by the pause frames the host send, but by the pause frames that host received.

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So you might end up wondering why your host sends pause frames but to only see the Rcv Pause duration go up. Now you know why Smile.

Now there were plans to fix this in WinOF 4.95. The original release note made mention of this and this made me quite happy as most people are confused enough when it comes to RDMA/RoCE/DCB configurations as it is.

A screenshot of the change in the original Mellanox WinOF VPI Release Notes revision 4.95

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Unfortunately, this did not happen. It was removed in a newer version of these release notes. My guess is it could have been a breaking chance of some sort if a lot of tooling or automation is expecting these counter names.

I still remember how puzzled I looked at the counters which to me didn’t make sense and the tedious labor of empirical testing to figure out that the wording was a bit “less than optimal”.

But look, once you know this you just need to keep it in mind. For now, we’ll have to live with some confusing Mellanox Windows PerfMon counter names. At least I hope I have saved you the confusion and time I went through when first starting with these Mellanox counters. Other than that I can only say that you should not be discouraged as they have been and are a great tool in checking RoCE DCB/PFC configs.

A first look at shared virtual disks in Windows Server 2016

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Introduction to shared virtual disks in Windows Server 2016

Time to take a first look at shared virtual disks in Windows Server 2016 and how they are set up. Shared VHDX was first introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2. It provides shared storage for use by virtual machines without having to “break through” the virtualization layer. This way is still available to us in Windows Server 2016. The benefit of this is that you will not be forced to upgrade your Windows Server 2012 R2 guest clusters when you move them to Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V cluster hosts.

The new way is based on a VHD Set. This is a vhds virtual hard disk file of 260 MB and a fixed or dynamically expanding avhdx which contains the actual data. This is the “backing storage file” in Microsoft speak. The vhds file is used to handle the coordination of actions on the shared disk between the guest cluster nodes?

Note that an avhdx is often associated with a differencing disk or checkpoints. But the “a” stands for “automatic”. This means the virtual disk file can be manipulated by the hypervisor and you shouldn’t really do anything with it. As a matter of fact, you can rename this off line avhdx file to vhdx, mount it and get to the data. Whether this virtual disk is fixed or dynamically expanding doesn’t matter.

You can create on in the GUI where it’s just a new option in the New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard.

Or via PowerShell in the way you’re used to with the only difference being that you specify vhds as the virtual disk extension.

In both cases both vhds and avhdx are created for you, you do not need to specify this.

You just add it to all nodes of the guest cluster by selecting a “Shared Drive” to add to a SCSI controller …

… browsing to the vhds , selecting it and applying the settings to the virtual machine. Do this for all guest cluster nodes

Naturally PowerShell is your friend, simple and efficient.

Rules & Restrictions

As before shared virtual disk files have to be attached to a vSCSI controller in the virtual machines that access it and it needs to be stored on a CSV. Both block level storage or a SMB 3 file share on a Scale Out File Server will do for this purpose. If you don’t store the shared VHDX or VHD Set on a CSV you’ll get an error.

Sure for lab purposes you can use an non high available SMB 3 share “simulating” a real SOFS share but that’s only good for your lab or laptop.

The virtual machines will see this shared VHDX as shared storage and as such it can be used as cluster storage. This is an awesome concept as it does away with iSCSI or virtual FC to the virtual machines in an attempt to get shared storage when SMB 3 via SOFS is not an option for some reason. Shared VHDX introduces operational ease as it avoids the complexities and drawbacks of not using virtual disks with iSCSI or vFC.

In Windows Server 2012 R2 we did miss some capabilities and features we have come to love and leverage with virtual hard disks in Hyper-V. The reason for this was the complexity involved in coordinating such storage actions across all the virtual machines accessing it. These virtual machines might be running on different hosts and, potentially the shared VHDX could reside on different CSVs. The big four limitations that proved to be show stopper for some use cases are in my personal order of importance:

  1. No host level backup
  2. No on line dynamic resize
  3. No storage live migration
  4. No checkpoints
  5. No Hyper-V Replica support

I’m happy to report most of these limitations have been taken care of in Windows Server 2016. We can do host level backups. We can online resize a shared VHDX and we have support for Hyper-V replica.

Currently in 2016 TPv4 storage live migration and checkpoints (both production and standard checkpoints) are still missing in action but who knows what Microsoft is working on or has planned. To the best of my knowledge they have a pretty good understanding of what’s needed, what should have priority and what needs to be planned in. We’ll see.

Other good news is that shared VHDX works with the new storage resiliency feature in Windows Server 2016. See Virtual Machine Storage Resiliency in Windows Server 2016 for more information. Due to the nature of clustering when a virtual machine loses access to a shared VHDX the workload (role) will move to another guest cluster node that still has access to the shared VHDX. Naturally if the cause of the storage outage is host cluster wide (the storage fabric or storage array is toast) this will not help, but other than that it provides for a good experience. The virtual machine guest cluster node that has lost storage doesn’t go into critical pause but keeps polling to see if it regains access to the shared VHDX. When it does it’s reattached and that VM becomes a happy fully functional node again.

It also supports the new Storage Qos Policies in Windows Server 2016, which is something I’ve found during testing.

Thanks for reading!

Musings On Switch Embedded Teaming, SMB Direct and QoS in Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V

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When you have been reading up on what’s new in Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V networking you probably read about Switch Embedded Teaming (SET). Basically this takes the concept of teaming and has this done by the vSwitch. Which means you don’t have to team at the host level. The big benefit that this opens up is the RDMA can be leveraged on vNICs. With host based teaming the RDMA capabilities of your NICs are no longer exposed, i.e. you can’t leverage RDMA. Now this has become possible and that’s pretty big.

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With the rise of 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100 Gbps NICs and switches the lure to go fully converged becomes even louder. Given the fact that we now don’t lose RDMA capabilities to the vNICs exposed to the host that call sounds only louder to many.  But wait, there’s even more to lure us to a fully converged solution, the fact that we now do no longer lose RSS on those vNICs! All good news.

I have written an entire whitepaper on convergence and it benefits, drawback, risks & rewards. I will not repeat all that here. One point I need to make that lossless traffic and QoS are paramount to the success of fully converged networking. After all we don’t want lossy storage traffic and we need to assure adequate bandwidth for all our types of traffic. For now, in Technical Preview 3 we have support for Software Defined Networking (SDN) QoS.

What does that mean in regards to what we already use today? There is no support for native QoS  and vSwitch QoS in Windows Server 2016 TPv3. There is however the  mention of DCB (PFC/ETS ), which is hardware QoS in the TechNet docs on Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and Switch Embedded Teaming (SET). Cool!

But wait a minute. When we look at all kinds of traffic in a converged Hyper-V environment we see CSV (storage traffic), live migration (all variations), backups over SMB3 all potentially leveraging SMB Direct. Due to the features and capabilities in SMB3 I like that. Don’t get me wrong about that. But it also worries me a bit when it comes to handling QoS on the hardware side of things.

In DCB Priority Flow Control (PFC) is the lossless part, Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) is the minimum bandwidth QoS part. But how do we leverage ETS when all types of traffic use SMB Direct. On the host it all gets tagged with the same priority. ETS works by tagging different priorities to different workloads and assuring minimal bandwidths out of a total of 100% without reserving it for a workload if it doesn’t need it. Here’s a blog post on ETS with a demo video DCB ETS Demo with SMB Direct over RoCE (RDMA .

Does this mean a SDN QoS only approach to deal with the various type of SMB Direct traffic or do they have some aces up their sleeves?

This isn’t a new “concern” I have but with SET and the sustained push for convergence it does has the potential to become an issue. We already have the SMB bandwidth limitation feature for live migration. That what is used to prevent LM starving CSV traffic when needed. See Preventing Live Migration Over SMB Starving CSV Traffic in Windows Server 2012 R2 with Set-SmbBandwidthLimit.

Now in real life I have rarely, if ever, seen a hard need for this. But it’s there to make sure you have something when needed. It hasn’t caused me issues yet, but I’m a performance & scale first, in “a non-economies of scale” world compared to hosters. As such convergence is a tool I use with moderation. My testing when traffic competes without ETS is that they all get part of the cake but not super predictable/ consistent. SMB bandwidth limitation is a bit of a “bolted on” solution => you can see the perf counters push down the bandwidth in an epic struggle to contain it, but as said it’s a struggle, not a nice flat line.

Also Set-SmbBandwidthLimit is not a percentage, but hard max bandwidth limit, so when you lose a SET member the math is off and you could be in trouble fast. Perhaps it’s these categories that could or will be used but it doesn’t seem like the most elegant solution/approach. That with ever more traffic leveraging SMB Direct make me ever more curious. Some switches offer up to 4 lossless queues now so perhaps that’s the way to go leveraging more priorities … Interesting stuff! My preferred and easiest QoS tool, get even bigger pipes, is an approach convergence and evolution of network needs keeps pushing over. Anyway, I’ll be very interested to see how this is dealt with. For now I’ll conclude my musings On Switch Embedded Teaming, SMB Direct and QoS in Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V

Hyper-V Storage QoS in Windows Server 2016 Works on SOFS and on LUNs/CSVs

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Introduction

I addressed storage QoS in Windows Server 2012 R2 at length in a coupe of blog posts quite a while ago:

I love the capability and I use it in real life. I also discussed where we were still lacking features and capabilities. I address the fact that there is no multiple host QoS, there is no cluster wide QoS and there is no storage wide QoS in Windows. On top of that, if there is QoS in the storage array (not many have that) most of the time this has no knowledge of Hyper-V, the cluster and the virtual machines. There is one well know exception and that GridStore, possible the only storage vendor that doesn’t treat Hyper-V as a second class citizen.

Any decent storage QoS that not only provides maximums but also minimums, does this via policies and is cluster and hypervisor even virtual machine aware. It needs to be easy to implement and mange. This is not a very common feature. And if it’s exists it’s is tied to the storage vendor, most of the time a startup or challenger.

Windows Server 2016

In Windows Server 2016 they are taking a giant step for all mankind in addressing these issues. At least in my humble opinion. You can read more here:

Basically  Microsoft enables us to define IOPs management policies for virtual machines based on virtual hard disks and  IOPs reserves and limits. These are shared by a group of virtual machines / virtual hard disks.  We can have better resource allocation between VMs, or groups of VMs. These could be high priority VMs or VMs belonging to an platinum customer /tenant. Storage QoS enhances what we already have since Windows Server 2012 R2.  It enables us to monitor and enforce performance thresholds via policies on groups of VMs or individual VMs.

Great for SLA’s but also to make sure a run away VM that’s doing way to much IO doesn’t negatively impact the other VMs and customers on the cluster. They did this via via a Centralized Policy Controller. Microsoft Research really delivered here I would dare say. A a public cloud provider they must have invested a lot in this capability.

At Ignite 2015 there was a great session by Senthil Rajaram and Jose Barreto on this subject. Watch it for some more details.

What caught my eye after  attending and watching sessions, talking to MSFT at the boot was the following marked in red.

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So not enabled by default on non SOFS storage but can you enable it on your block level CSV Hyper-V cluster? There is a lot of focus on Microsoft providing Storage QoS for SOFS. Which ties into the “common knowledge” that virtualization and LUNs are a bad idea, you need file share and insights into the files of the virtual machines to put intelligence into the hypervisor or storage system right? Well perhaps no! I Windows Server 2016 there is now also the ability to provide it to any block level storage you use for Hyper-V. Yes your low end iSCSI SAN or your high End 16Gbps FC SAN … as long as it’s leveraging CVS (and you should!). Yes, this is what they state in an awesome interview with my Fellow Hyper-V MVP Carsten Rachfahl at Ignite 2015.

Videointerview with Jose and Senthil Storage QoS Thumb2

Senthil and Jose look happy and proud. They should be.  I’m happy and proud of them actually as to me this is huge. This information is also in the TechNet guide Storage Quality of Service in Windows Server Technical Preview

Storage QoS supports two deployment scenarios:

Hyper-V using a Scale-Out File Server This scenario requires both of the following:

  • Storage cluster that is a Scale-Out File Server clusterCompute cluster that has least one server with the Hyper-V role enabled.
  • For Storage QoS, the Failover Cluster is required on Storage, but optional on Compute. All servers (used for both Storage and Compute) must be running Windows Server Technical Preview.

Hyper-V using Cluster Shared Volumes. This scenario requires both of the following:

  • Compute cluster with the Hyper-V role enabled
  • Hyper-V using Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) for storage

Failover Cluster is required. All servers must be running Windows Server Technical Preview.

So let’s have a quick go following the TechNet guide on a lab cluster leveraging CSV over FC with a Dell Compellent.image

Which give me running Storage QoS Resource

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And I can play with my new PoSh Commands … Get-StorageFlowQos, Get-StorageQosPolicy and Get-StorageQosVolume …

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The guide is full of commands, examples and tips. Go play with it. It’s great stuff Smile. I’ll blog more as I experiment.

Here’s my test VMs doing absolutely nothing, bar one on which I’m generating traffic. Even without a policy set it shows the IOPS the VM is responsible for on the storage node.image

Yu can dive into this command and get details about what virtual disk on what volume are contributing to the this per storage node.

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More later no doubt but here I just wanted to share this as to me this is very important! You can have the cookie of your choice and eat it to! So the storage can be:

  1. SOFS provided (with PCI RAID, Shared SAS, FC, FCoE, ISCI storage as backend storage) that doesn’t matter. In this case Hyper-V nodes can be clustered or stand alone
  2. The storage can be any other block level storage: iSCSI/FC/FCoE it doesn’t matter as long as you use CSVs. So yes this is clustered only. That Storage QoS Resource has to run somewhere.

You know that saying that you can’t do storage QoS on a LUN as they can’t be tweaked to the individual VM and virtual hard disks? Well, that’s been busted as myth it seems.

What’s left? Well if you have SOFS against a SAN or block level storage you cannot know if the storage is being used for other workloads that are not Hyper-V, policies are not cross cluster and stand alone hosts are a no go without SOFS. The cluster is a requirement for this to work with non SOFS Hyper-V deployments.  Also this has no deep knowledge or what’s happening inside of your storage array. So it knows how much IOPS you get, but it’s actually unaware of the total IOPS capability of the entire storage system or controller congestion etc. Is that a big show stopper? No. The focus here is on QoS for virtualization. The storage arrays storage behavior is always in flux anyway. It’s unpredictable by nature. Storage QoS is dynamic and it looks pretty darn promising to me! People this is just great. Really great and it’s very unique as far as I can say. Microsoft, you guys rock.