According to the following KB, it is recommended to disable atime-update on volumes serving SQL workloads.
Is this true for SAN workloads or just NAS (I guess SMB in the SQL example)?
The option atime-update is enabled by default on volumes created.
#Volume option atime-update on SAN volumes
1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)
it helps reduce metadata invalidation. It's not a big deal these days on SSD drives, but it was important in some SATA scenarios. To be fair I have never seen a measurable performance impact either way, but on the other hand there's almost zero applications that actually do care about ATIME so it never hurts to just disable it.
they added the atime-update-period parameter so that you can still have somewhat reliable atime updates without the metadata impact, by having WAFL update the atime on-disk only after X seconds. Less granularity, of course, but again no recent application that I know of actively relies on atime
Thank you for the input.
It's kind of annoying that you have to be in advanced mode to set the atime-update option, know of any way of setting it at creation of volume?
no, but as I explained, you can usually leave it on as it doesn't have any negative impacts on performance these days. the atime-update-period can be set during volume creation, but also only in advanced mode
If you are creating the volumes from the CLI, you can run both commands (vol create / vol mod) on one line:
set adv -c off;vol create -vserver <svm> -volume <vol> -aggregate <aggr> -size 4.1t;vol mod -vserver <svm> -volume <vol> -atime-update false;set adm -c on
We disable atime updates on all SAN volumes as part of our standard deploy. We leave it enabled on NAS volumes.
Ok, thank you!
I also disable it on NFS VMware datastores.
https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap-apps-dbs/vmware/vmware-vsphere-settings.html
That’s a little dated.
https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap-tools-vmware-vsphere-10/configure/esxi-host-values.html
gives better general info for current settings
@gray cove I have not seen the one you noted. It certainly lists more details but things like the tcpipheapsize are different compared to the older versions of Otv
Those are for the esxi. I believe the volume settings are still valid