How long should the initial mirroring take?

[Travelcard]

Hi there,
I have two Server 2003 32bit Enterprise machines with starwind (most recent download) and starport (newest beta version - only installed on the Primary server)

I am following your PDF in creating the mirror, but now I am at the "Clear mirrors (Waring: All data will be deleted)" section and the "Please Wait" window has popped up.

The progress bar moved right across to the end without closing. I am creating a 700GB mirror and it has been running for approximately 18 hours now. I forgot to make your TCP/IP tweaks before I started, so that'll probably make it slower (I presume that I can do those tweaks later).

The NICs are both 1GB.

Should I assume that it has failed and cancel?

Thanks.

[Travelcard]

Actually I've just looked in the program files and there is a log. The last line of which is:

"13:58:14:078 (596) P: '192.168.148.3:3260' panic!"



Doesn't sound good.

[Bohdan (staff)]

Hello,

Please zip and send us logs at support@rocketidivision.com. We'll find what's wrong.

[Travelcard]

Thanks for the reply.
I cancelled that one and am rebuilding the mirror at the moment (a 50GB one as a test instead)

If that one also has problems I will send those logs.

How long should mirroring of 50GB take anyway in your experience?

Thanks.

[Bohdan (staff)]

It depends on the transfer rate of your hard disk and your network performance.

For example:

Image file size to create = 600 GB;
Transfer rate = 20 MBs/s;
Time = 600*1024(MBs)/20(MBs/s) = 30720 seconds = 512 minutes = 8,5 hours

[Travelcard]

Ok, thanks I was looking for something like that.

My 50GB mirror has been running for almost 2 hours, so it should really be done by now.

[Travelcard]

Hi there.
I've had to cancel a few attempts so far because they took so long I thought that they were hung up.

I did a 256Mb mirror just to test that the setup worked at all. I may have been reading the logs wrong, but here is the calculation I get here expanded for 700GB:

Code: Select all

Mirror 256MB 
started 10:33:51
completed 10:35:04

total seconds 73

1Mb = 0.28515625 seconds

1GB = 1024 MB = 292 seconds
700GB = 204400 seconds


204400 seconds = 3406 mins = 56 hours

More than 2 1/2 days to mirror 700GB? That seems excessive.

We are using specialist hardware too!

What do you think may be going wrong?

In the meantime I will begin a 2GB mirror to see how long that takes.

Thanks for your help.

[Travelcard]

Ok while the 2048MB mirror started I made my calculations to pass the time:

Code: Select all

Mirror 2048MB
Started 11:08:27.828

Should take 584 seconds = 9.7 mins
should be finished at 11:18:19

... and that is exactly when the mirroring completed. That means my 700GB job really is going to take 56 hours

[Travelcard]

The log is 6GB in size, and it did take 56 hours to finish.

[Bohdan (staff)]

Something is definitely wrong.
Please zip and send us StarWind logs.
Is is possible for you to captude network traffic beetwen StarWind and iSCSI initiator machines with wireshark?

[Travelcard]

I can certainly send you the logs. There are no iSCSI initiator machines set up yet though. I have not heard of wireshark before, but do you want me to try to capture network traffic between the two starwind machines?

[Bohdan (staff)]

Thank you.
http://www.wireshark.org/download.html
Please install wireshark on either of StarWind machines and capture network traffic.
If the log files is large to send we can provide you with ftp access to upload the logs.

[Travelcard]

Thanks. I've never seen this program, but I think you've found something all right. There are loads of this kind of error:

76584 23.623262 192.168.148.1 192.168.148.11 TCP iscsi-target > 49309 [ACK] Seq=28541 Ack=83185265 Win=40960 [TCP CHECKSUM INCORRECT] Len=0 TSV=38739 TSER=35207709

Emailing the full log to support now.

[anton (staff)]

It's TCP engine offload warnings. Not related to the issue.