Extremely Slow Deploy to NVME drives

[robbit]

Hi,

Brand new here, we’ve recently decided to find a new imaging solution and went with Fog.

I’ve been running into a strange issue. I’ve captured an image on one of our new HP Elitebook 840 G6, which has a 256GB Western Digital PC SN520 NVMe SSD. It captures it just fine, around 7.5GB/min according to the screen. However, when I try to deploy the image to another G6 laptop, it starts up fine around 2.5GB/min then drops to a mere 20MB/min which says will take about 80hours. I had it run for few hours, and it just slowly progresses so at least it is moving forward but never let it run the full duration.

This is what it shows on screen when trying to deploy
Starting to resolve image (-) to drive (/dev/nvm0nep1)

I decided to play with few different NVME drives and all with same results, just goes to a crawl. The only way I got it to work was to install a m.2 SSD Sata, like SanDisk SD8SN8U-256G-1106. I slapped this m2 drive into a G6, and it deploys with speeds of around 7.5GB/min which is great! However, all these laptops we have are nvme.

I was wondering if I missed a step to properly capture a NVMe image or if there is another way to deploy. I’ve went through each thread about “slow deploy” but couldn’t find a solution. Thank you for your time. If you need any more information from me, let me know.

Image Configs:
Image Type: Single Disk - Resizable
Partition: Everything
Compresssion: Partclone Gzip 7
Image Size: 35.19GB

We’ve installed the following into our machine on an isolated network
Fog Version: 1.5.7
OS: CentOS 7
Fog Machine: Dell OptiPlex 7050
Fog RAM: 8GB
Fog CPU: i5-7500

[george1421]

@robbit said in Extremely Slow Deploy to NVME drives:

It captures it just fine, around 7.5GB/min according to the screen. However, when I try to deploy the image to another G6 laptop, it starts up fine around 2.5GB/min then drops to a mere 20MB/min which says will take about 80hours.

I find this interesting, in my experience a capture rate of 7.5GB/m is a little fast. And 2.5GB/m is much slower compared to your capture rates. I’m not saying its wrong only based on my experience capturing should be slower than deploy.

Your fog server “hardware” is more than capable for imaging. Is your target computer on the same subnet or even better the same network switch as your fog server? In fog imaging the target computer does most of the work in imaging. The fog server does really very little other than send the compressed file from the fog server’s hard drive to the target computer. Imaging speed is more dependent on how fast the target computer can intake the image, expand it and then write it to disk.

Lets try to eliminate your network infrastructure by putting the fog server and target computer on the same network switch and see what we get.

[robbit]

@george1421

Hi,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Maybe it’s more like 5GB/min? I forgot the exact number but it would only take no more than 10-15 minutes to deploy (at least to my m2 ssd).

I have a small unmanaged switch, both the target device and the fog server are plugged into it and nothing else. I’ve tried the basic troubleshooting of using different cables and switches as well.

[george1421]

@robbit Just for clarity you are getting 5GB/m deploy times or capture time? I would say that 5GB/m deploy is a tad low but not out of reason. I have seem some of the small (read cheap) 5 or 8 ports (soho) switches perform pretty badly.

FWIW, 6.1G/m is about maximum for a well designed 1GbE network. So 5.0GB/m is still acceptable.

Do you have an enterprise level switch to test with?

[robbit]

@george1421

I do, I have a 10port 1Gb managed switch (Cisco SG300-10SFP). I tried it out with the same results. It started out strong for few seconds but rate quickly drops. Elapsed time is about 5 minutes and the rate is at 90MB/min and still dropping. The progress percentage has also froze at 1.21% right now.

I’m not sure if it’s a red herring, but I suspect it’s something with the NVMe vs M.2 SSD. It deploys just fine with the M.2 SSD with the exact same laptop, switch, cables. But as soon as I put back the NVMe, this issue comes up. I got a 52port 1Gb managed switch as well if we want to get into medium size business switches as well

[george1421]

@robbit The sg300 is a good enough switch. So lets rule out network infrastructure.

The 7050 most likely has a NMVe disk in it. So I’m pretty sure we can rule out the FOG server, so that kind of leaves the target computer.

I’m trying to remember if I’ve seen this issue before with nvme. I’m thinking yes (but I see a lot of things in the threads so I may be mixing up issues). The latest version of fog is 1.5.7.2 which addresses a few issues that was discovered after 1.5.7 was release. How did you install FOG, was it using the git method or tarball?

[robbit]

@george1421 said in Extremely Slow Deploy to NVME drives:

tarball

Tarbell. I went https://fogproject.org/download to download it. Installed it as Normal Server.

I forgot to mention, Fog is installed on a standard 3TB 3.5" HDD. The images are being stored under /images.

[george1421]

I’m not going to say this will fix the issue but lets setup the git method, because it will be easier to install future updates this way. FWIW the download method is the tarball way.

Run these commands.

sudo apt-get update && apt-get install git

sudo -i
git clone https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject.git /root/fogproject
cd /root/fogproject/bin
./installfog.sh

Just rerun through the installer, it will use the answer file you created on the first install. Hopefully that will bring you up to 1.5.7.2, if not we will need to switch to the development branch. But lets see if we can get to the right version this way.

FWIW when a new release comes out you would just switch to the /opt/fogproject directory and do a git pull then change to the bin directory and run the installfog.sh script again. No need to download and extract the updated tarball.

That 3TB spinning hard disk won’t be a problem until you have 3-4 simultaneous unicast imaging running at the same time, then it will be the bottleneck in your fog server, with that single nic card being a close second.

[robbit]

@george1421

Thanks for the screenshot. Looks like I don’t have apt-get on CentOS 7. Is there another alternative? It seems like I just need to get Git, right? Tried running yum install git but got a bunch of errors about mirror sites not available.

[george1421]

@robbit ok I just assumed since most people install ubuntu for some reason you had that. Let me translate it for centos (what I use)

yum update -y
yum install git -y
git clone https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject.git /root/fogproject
cd /root/fogproject/bin
./installfog.sh

[robbit]

@george1421
updating now, I ran ./installfog.sh and it’s taking some time to backup database. I will report back tomorrow

Thank you for all the help so far! I’ve also just found this thread just now. We pretty much have the same exact laptop
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/13733/hp-elitebook-830-gen-6-issues-capturing-images-and-deploying-images/5

so I may try the kernal parameters as well (unless you suggest otherwise)

[Sebastian Roth]

@george1421 @robbit As for the commands to get the very latest develpment version (called dev-branch) you need to add one more command to what was posted below:

sudo -i
cd /root/fogproject/bin
git checkout dev-branch
./installfog.sh

Leaving that one command out doesn’t breach anything but you’ll end up with current master 1.5.7 again.

About the slow speed. Do you have Toshiba drives? https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/13620/very-slow-cloning-speed-on-specific-model

[robbit]

@Sebastian-Roth

Thank you for that. Our HP laptops were equipped with Western Digital PC SN520 NVMe SSD, but also tested with Toshiba NVMe THNSSN5256GPUK with same results. After the update, it still went to a crawl HOWEVER

When I went to change the Kernal parameter under FOG Configuration -> FOG Settings -> General -> Kernel args -> nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=5500 -> it’s working now. I was able to deploy the image to a NVMe drive via unicast.

Test#1 w/ Fog Server 1.5.7.3

• Same results with the NVMe drives where the rate goes to a crawl of about 10MB/min

Test#2 w/ nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=5500 + Fog 1.5.7.3

• Deploying at a solid speed ~5GB/min on isolated networrk

Whatever it is, the combination of both of those have fixed the issue.

I want to thank both you @george1421 and @Sebastian-Roth for chiming in! It’s good to know there’s a very active community for this.

[A Former User]

I am having this same issue. I posted about this a month ago. I tried the nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=5500 kernel argument but it returned an error about it being not a valid identifier after booting. I’ve updated to 1.5.7.4. Any other suggestions?

[george1421]

@Shad0wguy said in Extremely Slow Deploy to NVME drives:

nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=5500

This needs to go into the kernel parameters field either the global one in FOG Settings->FOG Configuration field or in the host specific field kernel parameter.

[KSiig]

I’m beginning to run into the same problem, also with an HP 840 G6. I’ve tried the kernel arguments, however it just says ‘not a valid indentifier’. I have a Samsung 850 evo M.2 Sata 6GB/s drive laying around which I tested with, along with an HP 830 G5:

830 + 850 EVO: Success
830 + Original NVMe SSD: Success
840 + Original NVMe SSD: Failure
840 + 850 Evo: Success

I compared the SSDs from the 840 G6 and the 830 G5, and they are the exact same model. So while it’s of course a very small sample size, it’s pretty clear that’s it has something to do with the 840 G6 combined with NVMe that’s causing the failure.

One thing that also only happens with the 840 G6 is that it shows the following message:

udevd[3088]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/nvme0n1p2, 10) failed: no such file or directory
udevd[3089]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/nvme0n1p1, 10) failed: no such file or directory

[Sebastian Roth]

@KSiig said in Extremely Slow Deploy to NVME drives:

however it just says ‘not a valid indentifier’

Please take a picture of the error and post here!!

[Middle]

We’re getting the same slow deployment speeds when deploying images to HP Elitebook 840 Gen 6 laptops. All other laptops are fine. Before the deploy starts (at very slow speeds), it will hang at the initial Partclone screen for 10 - 15 mins.

@Sebastian-Roth & @george1421 - Below is a photo of the the ‘not a valid identifier’ error we see. It will also hang at this stage from time-to-time.

Below is the setting applied to the host in Fog.

We’re running CentOS 7.6 with Fog v1.5.7.4 and Kernel 5.1.16. I’ve tried with and without nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=5500 set as the Host Kernel Arguments and Partclone 0.3.12 which @Quazz provided in another post.

The disks appear to be Toshiba NVMe kbg30zmv256g.

All suggestions welcome and happy to provide anymore info that might help troubleshoot.

[george1421]

@Middle That error message (while its a valid error message) isn’t important in this case. After testing the dot after nvme_core is at issue with the bash shell for variables to be used during image deployment. What IS important is that the linux kernel see that parameter and understand it. To test this you can create a debug deployment (capture or deploy) by ticking the debug checkbox just before scheduling the task. PXE boot the target computer and after a few screens of text you will be dropped to the FOS Linux command prompt. Key in sysctl -a | grep nvme If that nvme_core parameter is set then its job is done.

Now with that said, in another thread (I need to locate and link here) the developers are testing a new init (FOS Linux virtual hard drive) with updated version of partclone. The updated version of partclone along with the nvme_core kernel parameter seemed to fix the slow speeds with these specific nvme drives.

Edit: here is the link in @Quazz post. Understand this is an experimental init that hasn’t been fully tested, but has shown promise on these nvme drives. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/13620/very-slow-cloning-speed-on-specific-model/10

Edit2: Wait, I see from your picture you are already using the new inits because you have partclone 3.12. Hmmmm there must be something else going on here.

[Middle]

@george1421 entered debug and the nvme_core parameter doesn’t appear to be set.