[Poor Virtual Machine Virtual Disk Performance]

I have recently started using some VMs for various tasks. I have Drivepool installed on the host (Windows 10) and virtual disk files (VDI / VDX) saved in the pool (32TB across 10 Disks)

 

Each Virtual Disk is about 60GB

 

The issue is when I run a VM (Windows 10 client) the client Task manager reports 100% disk usage and the VM is VERY sluggish, (2-3 minutes to open task manager)

 

As a test, I moved the VM Virtual Disk to a Physical Hard Disk not in the pool and the VM performance was a lot better, no more 100% disk usage (night and day difference)(WD 4TB Red)

 

As another test I moved the VM Virtual Disk to a Physical Hard Disk which is part of the pool and had the same issues with performance (WD 8TB Red)

 

Drivepool is doing something that is causing access to the Virtual Disk file to be really slow.

 

In the Host, When the virtual disk file is in the pool, the pool disk that the virtual disk file is saved on, also sits at 100% when the VM is running.

[SSD Optimizer problem]

19 minutes ago, Jaga said:

If you mean a child pool of two 120's, then another higher level pool of the child and the 500, then add that pool to the main pool as it's SSD Cache... the limitation imposed on the largest single file copied to the main Pool would be that of the smallest volume/drive in the child caches (i.e. 120GB) since you have 2x duplication enabled.  The child pool of 120+120 would still need to hold a copy of whatever file was being written to the SSD cache (and duplicated there), and it has a limit of..  120GB per file.

If your largest file size is over 120GB..  getting another 500GB SSD to add as the 2nd cache child won't solve the underlying problem.  Software RAID 0 on the 120's will fix it without any issue however.

That's what expected, thank you. It's not so much that it's a single file over 120gb it's that i am backing up 3, 60gb files at once so after the 1st 2 files it just gives up.

 

I could do raid 0, 240 (120+120) + 240 (single drive) hopefully 240 should be enough

Thanks again for your time

[SSD Optimizer problem]

42 minutes ago, Jaga said:

Just tested this myself using two small partitions off a spare SSD I had in my server.  Turns out you actually can pool drives into a child pool, add that pool to your primary one, and then setup the SSD cache target to be the child pool.

However - Christopher's statement still holds true:  you'll be limited by the size of a single volume for your largest single file copy to the main pool.  i.e. if it's a file over 120GB, then it wouldn't fit on any of your 120GB cache drives.  That's just how Drivepool works - a file must fit on a single volume/drive.

As an alternate (and perhaps better solution), you could use software RAID 0 to create a stripe using 2 120GB SSDs, and then another stripe for the two new 120GB SSDs, and you'd have two valid 240GB SSD cache targets for your cache, which would support 2x duplication.  The performance might even go up due to that implementation.

 

Thank you for testing for me!, I might consider RAID 0. But do you know what would happen in a configuration with different sizes drives?

 

Ie

 

3 x SSDs

 

120GB +120GB+500GB - Would the available space still show as 120gb? Would X2 Duplication be handled ok?

 

Trying to keep as many drive bays free as possible

[SSD Optimizer problem]

On 10/9/2017 at 5:37 PM, Christopher (Drashna) said:

No rule on size.  But the size is heavily influenced by your needs.  If you're dumping 100's of GB per day, then you will definitely want larger drives. But if it's more like GBs per day, then a small size is going to be fine. 

Also, the size of the drive has to be large enough to fit the files. So if you plan on dumping 100GB files, then you need a drive that is larger than that, otherwise, you will get "out of space" errors when copying files

I just ran into this when trying to backup a few HDD images, and running a few VMS, i bought 2, 120GB SSD for caching but I looks I'll need 200GB-500GB to not run into any issues. 

I setup the cache because the VMs HDD access was sluggish.

I need 2 SSDs for duplication.

Question, i don't really want to waste those SSDs or money, is it possible to pool the 2,  120gb SSDs and buy 2 more 120gb SSDs and pool those, so i can a 240gb 2x duplication SSD cache? So, (120+120) + (120+120)?

[Combining 2 (or more) pools across separate machines.]

Unfortunately, no, not really.

 

StableBit DrivePool only supports local storage. 

 

 

 

You could use iSCSI (common on many NAS devices) to add more "local storage", use StableBit CloudDrive's "File Share" provider to store disk info on the other system, or add more storage (SAS or eSATA or USB, externally). 

 

 

After some research,I have decided, I am going to build a 24 disk JBOD connected to the host (Windows 10) via SAS Passthrough, if everything works, the host should see all 24 drives individually and i should be able to manage them in Drivepool. 

 

Hopefully? 

[Combining 2 (or more) pools across separate machines.]

The situation is, that I have run out of hard drive space in my current case.(15 drives)

 

Ideally I would like build another machine running Windows, with loads more disks, is it possible to combine disks from both machines into one pool?

 

If not is there an alternative way to achieve it? Perhaps instead of running Windows on the second box, running Some kind of NAS OS?

 

All ideas welcome

[I delete files on the Cloud drive, but the changes are not reflected in the software]

see the image below.

 

I deleted about 200GB but Clouddrive is still showing the google drive as full, and isn't updating, still shows as 500+GB if i log into Google drive.

 

i have tried cleanup, clearing cache and reauth (just in case)