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Status Not under consideration
Workspace Storage Protect Family
Categories Spectrum Protect (Backup-Archive Client)
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 28, 2018

RELATED IDEAS

Spectrum Protect: Integration of exfs -filesystem needed, minor changes to xfs, HPE will give assistance

IBM supports XFS as filesystem in IBM spectrum protect Linux-client.

We were using this solution on our scientific-storage for several years now (Suse SLES 11 with HA and XFS (CXFS as well at our second company site) as filesystem on our disk-shelfs.

For security reasons we asked SGI/HPE to upgrade our solution to more actual releases.

With SLES12SP3, the HPE/SGI supported HA-configuration needs to upgrade XFS to an more advanced version, which is now called EXFS.

Both filesystems are technically (nearly) identical, but for whatever reason HPE/SGI made the decision to use a different name, add some more mount-parameters and a new partition ID.

So – after updating to SLES12SP3 and exfs – spectrum-protect is not recognizing EXFS as XFS filesystem. To do some kind of backup we had to add virtual mountpoints in dsm.sys. We can now see our filesystems again in spectrum-protect client, but backup is done to a new filespace and backup is extremely slow.

We did a lot of research, debugging and tuning with the HPE/SGI-team to get our old performance back, but TSM is still extremely slow.

As our exfs-filesystem delivers data with 200-800Mbyte per second, spectrum protect only backs up with 0.3Gbyte per MINUTE, a single job which rans a few hours now runs a few days.

So HPE stated that the want to help IBM to support EXFS in future spectrum protect releases, so I (as IBM customer) should create a service request including HPE/SGI contacts to bring this project on the way. No solution in time for us, but maybe for other customers in the future.

Please let me know if you need more details for a RFE, maybe HPE-support team give you some more technical input if needed for a feature request.

I've some more eMail-addresses from HP-team members involved to share but not to public here :-)

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 2, 2018

    Comment from HPE (Sam Chan ), posted from an email

    EXFS(enhanced XFS) is a proprietary HPE product, which adds a few features to the standard XFS filesystem. EXFS is required for ISSP 4.x. when customers go to ISSP 4.0, it's necessary to convert their XFS filesystem(s) to EXFS. this conversion is done with tools that ship with ISSP 4.x. This is what this customer did when they went to ISSP 4.0.

    The conversion would change the superblock magic number of an XFS filesystem from the standard 0x58465342 to 0x45584653. There're also some feature additions with EXFS. Other than that, the layout and structure of EXFS is the same as XFS.

    EXFS is not related to upgrading SLES.

    We would like to work with IBM to have Tivoli natively support EXFS(hence the RFE) so that customer can run their backups normally again. The change to Tivoli should be minimal since EXFS is essentially the same as XFS, aside from those changes mentioned.

    If IBM is willing, we can certainly connect their engineers with ours to hash out the details in order to proceed with the RFE.


    ---- Away from this i am opening another PMR because of the debugging HPE did in the last days----
    (HPE) ...we have been testing with the backup and were able to debug the slowness in the backup. Here is a summary of our analysis
    [Hint: Option/Solution 1 doesn't make any difference on our system in fact]

    When data is moving, the rate seems ok until paging starts. When paging starts, there is a lot of time spent compacting HUGE pages. This slowdown due to paging is not the major slowdown however. The major slowdown is due to the dsmc process, which is the Tivoli backup executable, is getting stuck in user code checking a futex that keeps timing out.

    Here are 2 options that can be implemented based on Doug's analysis:
    1. Disable transparent huge pages(THP) and test again: use the echo command to change the setting now
    * How to disable transparent huge pages
    add the parameter 'transparent_hugepage=never' to the kernel cmdline For it to take effect immediately, run the command:
    'echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled'

    2. Open a case with IBM, reproduce the slowness and have IBM debug the application to determine why it is getting stuck on a futex.
    Based on the above analysis and in spite of the fact that upgrading ISSP on the customers server does not explain why the application would start exhibiting this behavior, it is time to bring in IBM to troubleshoot this further. HPE is not able to find any problems in the system which explain the Tivoli backup slowdown. So, test with THP disabled and engage IBM for help with the Tivoli application.

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