Detecting Unbalanced Workload Distribution on Controllers

A storage controller manages the flow of information between the server and the data, assigning two paths, in case one of the paths fails or is overloaded. For the best levels of performance and availability, every layer of technology must be balanced.

Compare the Processor Utilization of your Controllers

1.	In the console, double-click the ProcessorUtilization parameter of the first controller for which you need to compare the activity. A graph is automatically displayed in the graph pane.

Tree_Two_Processor_Utilization

Selecting Two ProcessorUtilization Parameters

2.	Select the ProcessorUtilization parameter of the second controller and drag it from the tree view of the Operator tab to the graph. The second parameter is automatically added to the first one to facilitate the comparison. Compare the values to evaluate the workload distribution.

GRAPH_Two_Processor_Utilization

Comparing Controllers ProcessorUtilization

For example, if the processor utilization on one controller goes above 80% while the other controller stays almost idle, it indicates that one of the controllers constitutes a bottleneck for the disk array that could be alleviated by better sharing the load between the controllers.

Administrators should pay close attention to which logical drive is handled by which controller, depending on the activity of this logical drives to be able to reallocate controller to drive I/O activity so that neither controller is overloaded. The activity of logical drives is monitored with the Virtual Disk application class.