VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle

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1 D E C E M B E R VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle Performance Brief AIX 5.2, Oracle 9iR2 VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle

2 Abstract This document details the high performance characteristics of VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle (SFOR) in a 64- bit AIX 5.2 operating environment based on the results of benchmark tests. VERITAS Quick IO (QIO), VERITAS Concurrent IO (CIO), VERITAS Extension for Oracle Disk Manager (ODM), VERITAS Volume Manager, (VxVM) Raw I/O, IBM JFS2 CIO and IBM LVM Raw I/O were the primary I/O configurations tested. ODM is Oracle s Disk Manager and is designed to improve file management and maintain Raw Storage performance. VERITAS Extension for ODM interfaces into Oracle s ODM. Raw storage architecture in most cases delivers the best OLTP performance numbers in an Oracle environment but at the cost of file system manageability, disk space management and CPU loading. Unix file systems such as AIX JFS2 in a database environment traditionally sacrifice performance due to file system locking layer and buffering for reads and writes. VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle s QIO feature for Oracle 7 and Oracle 8 and ODM extensions for Oracle 9i and Oracle 10g eliminate double-buffering and double copying while delivering database files system manageability and disk space manageability. This document examines the VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle QIO and ODM extension features. The database OLTP benchmark throughput results show that QIO and ODM maintain their performance throughput against VxVM and LVM Raw I/O performance results throughout the range of the performance test. ODM was the only I/O configuration that maintained high performance on average against VxVM Raw I/O performance at the higher user stress levels. JFS2 CIO and LVM RAW I/O performance dropped consistently against VxFS Raw I/O performance as user stress loads increased. Lack of an on-line storage array reconfiguration capabilities and a high performance multi-path channel interface will also depreciate database performance as user loads increase. VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle also has a number of features and functions that enable DBA s to maintain high overall system performance. SFOR s Dynamic Multipathing (DMP) feature enables the removal of channel performance constraints by allowing multiple channel connectivity to the Storage Area Network (SAN). In critical production environments, DMP can also be utilized to move sporadic non-production activities such as ad-hoc queries to non-production I/O channels, thus enabling higher predictable overall system performance. Enterprise VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle Storage Mapping feature enable DBA s to significantly spot and identify hot spots faster and alleviate I/O performance bottlenecks within an array quicker and gather performance statistics of the identified disk. These performance statistics used in conjunction with VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle on-line disk reconfiguration utility facilitate continuous performance tuning of a production database. These utilities efficiently empower DBAs to identify low performance disk, hot index tables, sluggish datafiles and identify their corresponding physical locations. Users also can track suspect data entities and gather statically evidence of poor performance. Upon detection of improperly laid out disks or over utilized index tables, DBA s can use SFOR VxDBA tools to stripe disks or use SFOR s QoSS feature to move index tables to another volume for increase performance. Please review VERITAS Database Performance Solutions From Infrastructure to Application white paper on VAN for additional information. The OLTP benchmark used in this study is commonly used to evaluate database performance of specific hardware and software configurations. By normalizing the system configuration and varying the file system I/O configuration, it was possible to study the impact of various storage layouts on database performance with this benchmark. The OLTP performance measurements illustrate that the Quick I/O and Oracle Disk Manager features enable the VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle to achieve comparable performance to RAW I/O configurations at lower CPU utilization. As the previous studies reported, this performance superiority remains the same no matter which Oracle release (32-bit Oracle or 64- bit Oracle) was used. Page 1

3 Introduction This document describes the performance of VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle in a 64-bit AIX 5.2 ML3 operating environment as measured by an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workload. The purpose of this brief is to illustrate the relationship of different I/O, memory configurations and their corresponding effects on database 1/O performance. The benchmark used for this performance comparison was derived from the commonly known TPC-C benchmark that comprises a mixture of read-only and update intensive transactions that simulate a warehouse supplier environment. (Details on this benchmark can be obtained from the Transaction Processing Council s web page at The following software releases were used in the tests: VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle (SFOR) Oracle 9iR2 (release , 64-bit) AIX 5.2 (ML3, 64-bit) VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle (SFOR) is comprised of the following components: VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 including: VERITAS Volume Manager TM (VxVM ) VERITAS File System TM (VxFS ) VERITAS Quick I/O VERITAS FlashSnap VERITAS Storage Mapping VERITAS Storage Checkpoint/Rollback VERITAS Enterprise Administrator VERITAS Extension for Oracle Disk Manager TM Test Configuration The OLTP benchmark tests were conducted on an IBM pseries 690 LPAR and (2) IBM FastT Storage Arrays connected on 2Gb Fibre Channel loops. The IBM pseries 690 LPAR were configured: (4) 1.5 Power 4 CPU 28 GB of memory (4) 2 Gbps FC controllers (HBAs) (2) FastT 900 Storage Arrays configured: o (84) 15K-RPM FC disks o (12) RAID 5 (6D+1P) LUNs The benchmark tests used (12) LUNs in the FastT 900 Arrays. These LUNs were pooled together and carved into logical volumes for individual tests with either IBM s LVM or the VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM) respectively. For the file system I/O feature type tests, two logical volumes were created on separate Oracle datafiles from online redo logs. For the datafile file system, a 12-way striped volume of 250 GB was created using the (12) LUNs. For the redo log file system, a striped volume of 9 GB was created from the same (12) LUNs. For RAW I/O configurations, each Oracle datafile resides on a separate 12-way striped volume using the same (12) LUNs. Similarly, each redo log resides on a separate logical volume using the same (12) LUNs. Page 2

4 The size of the database used for the tests was 213 GB with a total of (161) Oracle database files, including redo logs, indexes, undo, temporary and user tablespaces. The size of the database is that of a TPC-C database with a scale factor of 2,000 warehouses. The benchmark tests were conducted with 5 to 20 GB of Oracle buffer cache and the following (6) I/O configurations. VxVM Raw VxVM Quick I/O (QIO) VxVM Oracle Disk Manager VxFS Concurrent I/O (CIO) AIX LVM Raw AIX JFS2 AIX JFS2 Concurrent I/O (CIO) Tests VERITAS Volume Manager Raw I/O performance Tests VERITAS Volume Manager Quick I/O feature performance Tests VERITAS Volume Manager Extension for Oracle Disk Manager performance Tests VERITAS File System Concurrent I/O mode performance Tests IBM Logical Volume Manager Raw I/O performance Tests IBM Enhanced Journaled File System performance Tests IBM Enhanced Journaled File System Concurrent I/O mode performance The Oracle block size used for all these tests was 4 KB. During the test Oracle statistics, Volume Manager statistics, Quick I/O statistics, and ODM I/O statistics were gathered in addition to the benchmark throughput report. Results and Analysis The primary performance metric used in this brief is a throughput metric that measures the number of transactions completed per minute (TPM). The transaction mix in this OLTP benchmark represents the processing of entering an order, paying for an order, checking an order and delivering an order; this follows the model of a complete business activity. The TPM metric is a measure of business throughput. Table 1 lists the database throughput results of various benchmark tests of different I/O configurations in various Oracle buffer cache sizes combinations. The stress level was fixed at 50 batch users in the following tests. The relative plot of all database throughput results are compared to VxVM Raw I/O performance throughput results for individual buffer cache sizes and are shown in Figure 1. Table 1 - Summary of vmstat outputs for RAW I/O, ODM and QIO, at the stress level of 50 batch users. Database Throughput in Transactions per Minute (TPM) Buffer Cache Size I/O Configurations 5GB 10GB 15GB 20GB VxVM-RAW 15,271 18,170 20,102 23,374 VxVM QIO 15,000 17,828 19,771 22,589 VxVM ODM 14,706 17,632 19,758 22,645 VxFS-CIO 14,731 17,578 19,478 22,641 LVM-RAW 15,761 18,531 19,438 20,900 JFS2-CIO 15,792 18,469 19,513 21,043 Figure 1 shows that the database throughput of VxFS QIO and ODM, track closely with the performance of VERITAS VxVM RAW I/O. Table 1 shows that QIO and ODM are able to take better advantage of the increasing buffer cache sizes. VxVM QIO, VxFS CIO and VxVM ODM I/O configurations were better able to maintained high performances on average against Raw I/O Page 3

5 performance at the higher buffer cache sizes. JFS2 Raw and JFS2 CIO high performances on average dropped off against VxVM Raw I/O performance as the buffer cache size increased. 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5, GB 10GB 15GB 20GB VxVM-RAW VxVM QIO VxVM ODM VxFS-CIO LVM-RAW JFS2-CIO Buffer Cache Size Figure 1 - Relative plot of database throughput compared with varying buffer cache sizes The user stress test measures how the various file system I/O configurations scale under different stress levels by changing the number of batch users. The TPM results of these I/O configurations vs. user stress tests are plotted in Figure 2. The size of Oracle buffer cache was fixed at 15 GB and the stress loading was varied from 20 to 100 users Table 2 shows that VxFS CIO, QIO and ODM scale with the increasing stress levels. VxFS CIO, ODM were the only I/O configurations that maintained high performances on average against Raw I/O performance at the higher user stress levels. JFS2 Raw and JFS2 CIO high performances on average dropped off against VxVM Raw I/O performance as the user load increased. Database Throughput in Transactions per Minute (TPM) Number of Users I/O Configurations VxVM-RAW 16,147 19,499 21,649 24,456 26,301 VxVM QIO 16,005 19,166 21,106 23,950 25,486 VxVM ODM 15,778 18,976 21,122 23,946 26,285 VxFS-CIO 16,039 18,959 21,515 24,013 26,243 LVM-RAW 16,018 19,412 19,706 20,357 21,289 JFS2-CIO 16,032 19,188 19,697 20,399 21,258 Table 2 Figure 2 - Database throughput measured at different stress levels. Page 4

6 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5, VxVM Raw VxVM QIO VxVM ODM VxFS CIO LVM-RAW JFS2-CIO Number of Users Figure 2 - Database throughput measured at different stress levels. Summary The OLTP benchmark used in this study is commonly used to evaluate database performance of specific hardware and software configurations. By normalizing the system configuration and varying the file system I/O configuration, it was possible to study the impact of various storage layouts on database performance with this benchmark. The OLTP performance measurements illustrate that the Quick I/O and Oracle Disk Manager features enable the VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle to achieve comparable performance to RAW I/O configurations. As the previous studies reported, this performance superiority remains the same no matter which Oracle release (32-bit Oracle or 64-bit Oracle) was used. For database servers using intelligent arrays with large cache, VxFS Direct I/O feature is also able to achieve RAW I/O equivalent performance and scales well at higher stress levels. Page 5

VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle

J U N E 2 0 0 4 VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.0 for Oracle Performance Brief OLTP Solaris Oracle 9iR2 VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle Abstract This document details the high performance characteristics