Veritas Access Appliance Administrator's Guide
- Section I. Introducing Access Appliance
- Section II. Configuring Access Appliance
- Managing users
- Configuring the network
- Configuring authentication services
- Configuring user authentication using digital certificates or smart cards
- Section III. Managing Access Appliance storage
- Configuring storage
- Managing disks
- Access Appliance as an iSCSI target
- Configuring storage
- Section IV. Managing Access Appliance file access services
- Configuring the NFS server
- Setting up Kerberos authentication for NFS clients
- Using Access Appliance as a CIFS server
- About configuring CIFS for Active Directory (AD) domain mode
- About setting trusted domains
- About managing home directories
- About CIFS clustering modes
- About migrating CIFS shares and home directories
- About managing local users and groups
- Using Access Appliance as an Object Store server
- Configuring the NFS server
- Section V. Managing Access Appliance security
- Section VI. Monitoring and troubleshooting
- Configuring event notifications and audit logs
- About alert management
- Appliance log files
- Configuring event notifications and audit logs
- Section VII. Provisioning and managing Access Appliance file systems
- Creating and maintaining file systems
- Considerations for creating a file system
- About managing application I/O workloads using maximum IOPS settings
- Modifying a file system
- Managing a file system
- Creating and maintaining file systems
- Section VIII. Provisioning and managing Access Appliance shares
- Creating shares for applications
- Creating and maintaining NFS shares
- About the NFS shares
- Creating and maintaining CIFS shares
- About the CIFS shares
- About managing CIFS shares for Enterprise Vault
- Integrating Access Appliance with Data Insight
- Section IX. Managing Access Appliance storage services
- Configuring episodic replication
- Episodic replication job failover and failback
- Configuring continuous replication
- How Access Appliance continuous replication works
- Continuous replication failover and failback
- Using snapshots
- Using instant rollbacks
- Configuring episodic replication
- Section X. Reference
About striping file systems
You can obtain huge performance benefits by striping (RAID-0) using software-defined storage (SDS). You achieve performance benefits regardless of the choice of LUN configuration in your storage hardware. Striping is useful if you need large amounts of data that is written to or read from physical disks, and consistent performance is important. SDS striping is a good practice for all Access Appliance use cases and workloads.
Veritas strongly recommends that you create striped file systems when creating your file system for the following reasons:
Maximize the I/O performance.
Proportion the I/O bandwidth available from the storage layer.
Balance the I/O load evenly across multi-user applications running on multiple nodes in the cluster.
However there are also pitfalls to avoid.
The following information is essential before selecting the disks to include in your striped file system:
Understanding of your hardware environment
Storage capabilities and limitations (bottlenecks)
Choice of LUNs (each LUN, or disk, equates to a column in a SDS-striped volume)
An extreme example might be if one column (equal to one LUN) is composed of only hard disk drives (HDDs) in the storage array. All of the other columns in the same striped volume are composed of only SSDs in the storage array. The overall I/O performance bottlenecks on the single slower HDD LUN.
Understanding the LUN configuration and ensuring that all of the LUNs have an identical configuration is therefore essential for maximizing performance and achieving balanced I/O across all the LUNs.
All 24 LUNs have an identical hardware configuration.
The performance team created a volume with 24 columns to use the entire storage bandwidth in one file system. Veritas does not advise changing the operating system default maximum I/O size of 512 KB. The optimum stripe-unit size is 512 KB.