Improving destage performence in a windows media server

[Sat-Chit-ananda]

Hi All,

I have been sucessful in extracting real good performence from LTO-4 drives on Solaris 10 X86 platform.

How it was done is shared here. But , I donot see good performence in Windows 2008 VMWARE media server when it comes DSSU drain perforemnce.

Questions

1)How to enable read ahead in windows server 2008?

2)Is there parameter similar to discovred diret I/O in wsndows server 2008?
3)Any tips or tricks to match or get better performence in wondows, any pointers will greatly helpful.

Slow drain performence is real pain in the neck, any help is appriciated.

Regards

[Nicolai]

I am no windows expert but I can do Google:

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/WindowsServer2008ConfigurationandTuning.pdf

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.03.kernel.aspx

Both notes look worth reading.

[sdo]

When you say "Windows 2008 VMWARE media server" - do you mean that the Windows server hosting the DSSU is a virtualised guest VM server ?  Or is the Windows 2008 server a physical box with access (SAN or iSCSI) to the same storage that VMware is running on ?

When you say VMware - do you mean ESXi, or Workstation, or Fusion, or something else ?

Is anti-virus installed on the Windows server hosting the DSSU ?

Is the anti-virus in "scan reads" mode ?

Has the volume that contains the DSSU been excluded from anti-virus scanning ?

Can the Windows server hosting the DSSU see the tape drives (i.e. is this an SSO environment) - or does the DSSU drain across the network to the Solaris media server that has the tape drives ?

Is your DSSU local physical disk, or a guest VM vhd, or SAN (FC) disk, or NAS (iSCSI/SMB/NFS) disk ?

Is the volume formed from RAID storage ?

Is it software (Windows RAID) or hardware RAID - e.g. behind an LSI / PERC card - or on a third party storage array ?

If so, how many spindles make up the parity group ?

Any other volumes on the parity group, i.e. do you have exclusive use ?

Anything else using the volume that the DSSU is on ?

What file system is the DSSU (VxFS, NTFS, other) ?

What does this show:

    $ bpgetconfig -M myserver sectorsperbuffer

    (change myserver to the name of the server hosting the DSSU)

If the volume is NTFS what does this show:

    $ fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo ?: | find /i "bytes"

    (change ?:   to the drive letter of the volume hosting your DSSU)

What does this show on the server hosting the DSSU:

    $ vssadmin list writers

    $ vssadmin list providers

    $ vssadmin list volumes

    $ vssadmin list shadowstorage

    $ vssadmin list shadows

Do these files exist, and if so what values do they contain ?

   .../NetBackup/db/config/SIZE_DATA_BUFFERS_DISK

   .../NetBackup/db/config/NUMBER_DATA_BUFFERS_DISK