Tivoli Storage Manager Disk Tuning and Best Practices with XIV

Answer

If the DB is under XIV, then use 1 logical volume, but have multiple containers as recommended for other disk subsystems. Use at least 4 containers or 8 for larger environments.

For Storagepools, consider the following:
-If you have many volumes on too few LUNS, then there won't be much benefit from cache readahead from the XIV. You also have to deal with fragmentation with this setup.
-Each LUN has a queue depth, so if you have too few, it limits the number of outstanding IOs to a given LUN.
-If there are too many LUNs it makes it harder to manage by the administrator.

It is recommended to configure large host HBA queue depths. Start with a queue depth of 64 per HBA to take advantage of the parallelism capabilities of the XIV.

In addition, do not use any logical volumes or other methods to stripe data unless it is required for reasons other than performance.

An example of a starting disk storage pool layout, assume the following:
- 1 TB of disk is available for the storage pool.
- 4+1raid5 will be used.

DISK Storage Pool - 50Gb volumes are a good place to start
There should be 4 volumes (to match the 4+1raid5) per hdisk and 1 hdisk per LUN. This would mean each hdisk/LUN is 200GB and 5 would be needed to use the 1TB of storage available.

FILE Storage Pool - 20 to 25 GB volumes are a recommended size (default is 2GB).
There should be 4 volumes (to match the 4+1raid5) per hdisk and 1 hdisk per LUN. This would mean each hdisk/LUN is 100GB and 10 would be needed to use the 1TB of storage available.