Question about Used Space and refreservation
Added by David Marker about 1 year ago
We're using Nexenta in our vmware production environment. We recently ran into an issue where our SAN filled up to the point that our auto-sync jobs didn't have enough space left to create their snapshots, so they would fail. Bear in mind that we've come nowhere close to filling our vmfs datastores. The zfs dataset sizes were only a couple hundred GB. We've found that in our particular case, the usedbyrefreservation was using all or almost all of our zvol. Is this the typical case when you put a vmfs datastore on a zvol? The calculation for used space includes usedbyrefreservation+usedbydataset. In my mind, for our particular use case, this is incorrectly indicating the size of the used space to the main zpool and under-reporting the amount of free space left for new zvols, snapshots, and other space consuming objects.
Am I incorrect in my thinking? Would it make more sense to drop into !bash and create our zvols using the reservation option instead? If we create a vmfs datastore, does that definitely make sure the full datastore amount of space is available for the datastore?
Replies
RE: Question about Used Space and refreservation - Added by Ryan W about 1 year ago
When I set refreservation on one of my ZVOLs (I did it just now) the USED portion of 'zfs list' jumped from 100GB to 300GB. So the accounting should be right.
What I've always had a problem with is the fact the datasets status page is using the zpool volume sizes, which are the pre-baked figures before accounting for parity, metadata and redundancy. I've raised this issue with Nexenta a number of times, but their answer presently is they use these numbers because that's what you license based off (RAW Capacity) even though your actual capacity is less.
Perhaps that's where you ran out of space? eyeballing AVAIL/Free in the data management GUI? That figure did not change when I set refreservation.
zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT raidpool 1.63T 913G 755G 54% 1.00x ONLINE - syspool 136G 19.3G 117G 14% 1.00x ONLINE - tank 3.25T 282G 2.97T 8% 1.00x ONLINE - root@calculon:/volumes# zfs set refreserv=300GB raidpool/esxi_zvol root@calculon:/volumes# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT raidpool 1.63T 913G 755G 54% 1.00x ONLINE - syspool 136G 19.3G 117G 14% 1.00x ONLINE - tank 3.25T 282G 2.97T 8% 1.00x ONLINE -
zfs set refreserv=none raidpool/esxi_zvol root@calculon:/volumes# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT raidpool 1.63T 913G 755G 54% 1.00x ONLINE - syspool 136G 19.3G 117G 14% 1.00x ONLINE - tank 3.25T 282G 2.97T 8% 1.00x ONLINE -
zfs set refreserv=300GB raidpool/esxi_zvol root@calculon:/volumes# zfs list raidpool NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT raidpool 757G 64.2G 60K /volumes/raidpool root@calculon:/volumes# zfs set refreserv=none raidpool/esxi_zvol root@calculon:/volumes# zfs list raidpool NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT raidpool 457G 364G 60K /volumes/raidpool
RE: Question about Used Space and refreservation - Added by David Marker about 1 year ago
No, it was definitely an issue where zfs reported only a few GB of space left in the main pool. After looking at our numbers again, we're suspecting that somewhere between various auto-syncs back and forth between our production cluster and replication cluster during the testing phase, the usedbyrefreservation value was somehow increased/corrupted. The additional zvol we added for backups after we went into production is fine and reporting correctly. We've svmotioned a couple of machines to a newly-created replacement zvol and everything appears to be reporting correctly now.
RE: Question about Used Space and refreservation - Added by David Marker about 1 year ago
Well, I have apparently spoken too soon. Our box crashed overnight during an auto-sync job and now we're having the issue crop up again. Here's what our zvol looks like:
root@I6K-Left:/volumes# zfs get all JJC/ZVOL01
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
JJC/ZVOL01 type volume -
JJC/ZVOL01 creation Wed Dec 7 10:04 2011 -
JJC/ZVOL01 used 2.24T -
JJC/ZVOL01 available 4.63T -
JJC/ZVOL01 referenced 703G -
JJC/ZVOL01 compressratio 1.18x -
JJC/ZVOL01 reservation none local
JJC/ZVOL01 volsize 2T local
JJC/ZVOL01 volblocksize 64K -
JJC/ZVOL01 checksum on default
JJC/ZVOL01 compression on local
JJC/ZVOL01 readonly off default
JJC/ZVOL01 copies 1 default
JJC/ZVOL01 refreservation 2T local
JJC/ZVOL01 primarycache all default
JJC/ZVOL01 secondarycache all default
JJC/ZVOL01 usedbysnapshots 1.37G -
JJC/ZVOL01 usedbydataset 703G -
JJC/ZVOL01 usedbychildren 0 -
JJC/ZVOL01 usedbyrefreservation 1.55T -
JJC/ZVOL01 logbias latency default
JJC/ZVOL01 dedup off default
JJC/ZVOL01 mlslabel none default
JJC/ZVOL01 sync standard default
JJC/ZVOL01 nms:swap no local
JJC/ZVOL01 nms:description JJC 1st zvol local
The usedbyrefreservation and usedbydataset were adding up to 2TB perfectly until after the system crashed. This may be turning into more of a Help issue than a discussion..
RE: Question about Used Space and refreservation - Added by Linda Kateley about 1 year ago
if you have a support contract, it might be a good time to use it. This appears to be a bug. You can report it as a bug in the tool as a community member.
do you have any log data from the crash? crashes typically are caused by failed hardware.
RE: Question about Used Space and refreservation - Added by David Marker about 1 year ago
Yes, we have gold support. I've already got another ticket open with them regarding an issue with auto-sync. I last commented in that issue on Nov. 28th and haven't heard back since then. Regardless, I'll put in another ticket and see what happens.
RE: Question about Used Space and refreservation - Added by Linda Kateley about 1 year ago
David, if you have a number can you send it to me in email and i will follow up? linda.kateley@nexenta.com