InfoScale™ 9.0 SmartIO for Solid-State Drives Solutions Guide - Linux

Last Published:
Product(s): InfoScale & Storage Foundation (9.0)
Platform: Linux
  1. Introducing SFHA Solutions SmartIO
    1.  
      About SmartIO for solid-state drives
    2.  
      About SmartIO in an SFHA environment
    3.  
      About SmartIO in an Active/Active cluster environment
    4.  
      About SmartIO in the Solaris virtualized environments
    5.  
      About SmartIO in the Linux virtualized environment
    6.  
      About the SmartIO caching profiler tool
  2. Using the SmartIO feature: use cases
    1. About SmartIO read caching for applications running on VxVM volumes
      1.  
        Required configuration for SmartIO read caching for VxVM volumes
      2.  
        Automatic caching for VxVM volumes
      3.  
        Setting up SmartIO read caching for VxVM volumes
      4.  
        Verifying the VxVM cache area and monitoring the caching
    2. About SmartIO read caching for applications running on VxFS file systems
      1.  
        Required configuration for SmartIO read caching for a VxFS file system
      2.  
        Automatic caching for VxFS file systems
      3.  
        Setting up SmartIO read caching for VxFS file systems
      4.  
        Verifying the VxFS cache area and monitoring the caching
      5.  
        Customizing the caching behavior
    3. About SmartIO caching on SSD devices exported by FSS
      1.  
        Status of cache areas when nodes leave or join the cluster
      2.  
        Setting up cache areas using SSDs exported by FSS
    4. About SmartIO write-back caching for applications running on VxFS file systems- DLV 11 to 13
      1.  
        Required configuration for SmartIO write-back caching for a VxFS file system
      2.  
        Setting up SmartIO write-back caching for VxFS file systems
      3.  
        Verifying the VxFS cache area and monitoring the caching (writeback mode)
    5. About SmartIO FEL-based writeback caching for applications running on VxFS file systems- DLV 14 and later
      1.  
        Required configuration for FEL-based write-back caching for a VxFS file system
      2.  
        Setting up FEL-based write-back caching for VxFS file systems
      3.  
        Verifying the VxFS cache area and monitoring FEL-based write-back caching
    6. About multiple SmartIO cache areas for read and write-back caching on VxFS file systems
      1.  
        About the smartiocache option
      2.  
        Converting VxFS cache areas from one type to another
      3.  
        Setting up multiple cache areas on a system
      4.  
        Verifying the VxFS cache areas
    7. About SmartIO caching for Oracle databases on VxFS file systems
      1.  
        Prerequisites and configuration for using the SmartIO plug-in for Oracle
      2.  
        Setting default SmartIO caching policies for a database running on a VxFS file system
      3.  
        Setting SmartIO caching policies for database objects
      4.  
        Pinning and unpinning database objects
      5.  
        Enabling and disabling caching for the database
      6.  
        Listing cache policy details for the database
      7.  
        Listing cache statistics for the database
    8. About SmartIO caching for databases on VxVM volumes
      1.  
        Applying a SmartIO database caching template for a VxVM volume
    9.  
      Technology Preview: Distributed SmartIO in Arctera InfoScale storage environments
  3. Administering SmartIO
    1.  
      Creating a cache area
    2.  
      Displaying information about a cache area
    3. Enabling or disabling caching for a data object
      1.  
        Enabling or disabling caching for a file system
      2.  
        Enabling or disabling caching for a data volume
    4.  
      Adding a device to the cache area
    5.  
      Pausing caching from a volume to a cache area
    6.  
      Removing a device from the cache area
    7.  
      Destroying a cache area
    8.  
      Setting the attributes of the VxVM cache area
    9.  
      Setting or changing the caching mode for a VxFS cache area
    10.  
      Flushing dirty data from a writeback cache area
    11.  
      Tuning the writeback caching
    12. Viewing the SmartIO cache statistics
      1.  
        Viewing the detailed caching stats for a VxVM cache area
      2.  
        Viewing the detailed caching stats for a VxFS cache area
  4. Troubleshooting and error handling
    1. Support for a persistent or 'warm' VxVM cache
      1.  
        Primary volume failure with a stale cache could cause possible data corruption
      2.  
        Migrating a cache during HA failover is not supported
    2.  
      Cache area is lost after a disk failure (3158482)
    3.  
      Cache is not online after a reboot
    4.  
      Recovering the write-back cache after a node failure
  5. Appendix A. Command reference
    1.  
      SmartIO command reference

About SmartIO in an SFHA environment

In a clustered environment, the SmartIO cache is local to each node in the cluster. The cache area cannot be brought offline from one node and then brought online on a different node.

When SmartIO read caching is used in an Active/Passive environment such as with SFHA, you can deport and import the data volumes and file systems to another node. The SmartIO cache is not moved to the other node. Caching starts on the new node with the local SmartIO cache area there. SmartIO does not provide the capability to migrate the cache in a high availability cluster during a failover.

For VxFS write-back caching, failing over the disk group is not recommended. In the case of local mount, if there is no cache mirror, the disk copy of the file can be incomplete or stale if the node fails. Arctera recommends using SFCFSHA instead, which provides data reflection of the cache.