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I'm about to install a large and rather busy DB2 database on a server which uses XIV for (non-transaction log) storage. The server will be running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (64 bit). Linux offers the choice between a number of I/O schedulers. Which of the I/O schedulers is most suitable for devices residing on an XIV storage system?

To me, it sounds like the "noop" scheduler (which does a minimum of clever tricks) is the obvious choice, because it leaves all the I/O-reorderings to the storage system. Am I right?

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I have now had time to do some bonnie++ and fio benchmarks, and it seems that choosing staying with the default ("cfq") scheduler actually gives better numbers all along. Somewhat surprising. – Troels Arvin Mar 17 '10 at 11:00
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Yes.

I suppose I could pad this answer out by saying "you should benchmark in your environment" but yea, pretty much any advanced SAN is going to be up to enough tricks that you should feed it the dumbest/raw stream possible and let it do its thing.

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+1: been there, done that, stuck with noop – Javier Jan 29 '10 at 22:32
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You should probably benchmark it using the same hardware in a non-production environment.

I did this on a moderately clever array (Dell Powervault MD3000) and found that the noop scheduler beat the default cfq by a significant bit on my workload.

It definitely depends on your workload, and may make no difference on some. From what I hear, the noop scheduler is better for devices that are either "clever" (raid controllers with lots of spindles etc) or very fast (SSDs)

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