Intel Modular Server SSD and SAS disk performance on Citrix Xenserver 6.0.2 – Debian 7 Wheezy Dom0 guest

Debian 7 Wheezy was installed by first installing Debian 6 Squeeze and then adding testing repo to /etc/apt/sources.list.

# cat sources.list
# deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian/ squeeze main

deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://cdn.debian.net/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
#deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian/ squeeze main
#deb-src http://cdn.debian.net/debian/ squeeze main

deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main
#deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
#deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main

# squeeze-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian/ squeeze-updates main
deb-src http://cdn.debian.net/debian/ squeeze-updates main

Before you do a dist-upgrade, make sure to install xe-tools.
Then do a dist upgrade:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Before reboot to new 3.2.x kernel, make sure you add nobarrier option to each virtual disk in /etc/fstab or you may see errors.

Disks used:
xvda – Intel 320 SSD RAID1
xvdb – Seagate Savvio 10K.5 ST9900805SS SAS RAID1

Performance results:

# hdparm -tT /dev/xvda
/dev/xvda:
Timing cached reads: 14152 MB in 1.99 seconds = 7116.64 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 1794 MB in 3.00 seconds = 597.91 MB/sec

# hdparm -tT /dev/xvdb
/dev/xvdb:
Timing cached reads: 14210 MB in 1.99 seconds = 7145.46 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 1834 MB in 3.00 seconds = 611.16 MB/sec

2 thoughts on “Intel Modular Server SSD and SAS disk performance on Citrix Xenserver 6.0.2 – Debian 7 Wheezy Dom0 guest

  1. Evgeny says:

    Hi, great post. I’m looking into using ssd’s with xenserver as well. And it seems I’ll have to go this way as well, as I don’t like the idea of underperforming disk in the server. The question to your set up is, did you install from citrix xen 6.0.2 cd? How save such upgrade may be? I mean are there any errors or problems with XS in further operation. Did you try to use this setup in production?

  2. Yllar says:

    Yes, I installed from a XenServer 6.0.2 install cd. If you have many compute modules in your server you can use live migration and move all vm-s to other compute modules with minimal downtime and then update the software of the compute module you just moved the vm-s away from. This should be a pretty safe way to update XenServer software. I use this setup in a production environment for about 2 months now without probems.

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