NetApp deduplication is a postponed process. During normal operation Data ONTAP only calculates hashes for the data blocks. Actual deduplication is carried out off-hours as per configured schedule. Hash calculation doesn’t affect performance in most cases. I talked about that in my previous post. NetApp states in its documentation that deduplication is a low-priority process:
When one deduplication process is running, there is 0% to 15% performance degradation on other applications.
Once I faced a situation when deduplication was configured to be carried out during business hours on one of the volumes. No one noticed that at some point volume run out of space and Data ONTAP wasn’t able to perform deduplication from that time. Situation became worse when Data ONTAP was upgraded from version 7.3.2 to 8.1.0. Now during deduplication filer tried to upgrade the fingerprint metadata to a new version at 15:00 every day with the message: “Fingerprint is being upgraded” and failed. It seems that the metadata upgrade is a very resource-intensive process and heavily affects I/O latency.
This volume was not a VMware datastore, but it sit on the same aggregate together with the several VMFS LUNs. Here what happened to the VMware I/O latency every day at 15:00 (click to enlarge):
I deleted the host name and the datastores names from the graph. You can see the large latency spike, which won’t turn yourVMs into kernel panic, but it’s not the thing you would want your production environment to experience every day.
The solution was simple. After space was increased on this volume, deduplication metadata upgrade performed successfully and problem went away. Additionally, deduplication was shifted to off-hours.
The simple lesson to learn: don’t schedule deduplication during the day, you never know what could possibly go wrong.
Tags: aggregate, controller, Data ONTAP, datastore, deduplication, degradation, ESXi, Filer, fingerprint, hash, I/O, latency, LUN, NetApp, performance, schedule, vCenter, virtual machine, VM, VMFS, vmware, volume
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