 | ||
| Considerations for running a parallel scan | ||
|---|---|---|
| Prev | Configuring scanning and event monitoring | Next |
You can configure a collector to scan multiple shares of filers in parallel. By default, each scan process uses a single thread to perform the scanning. For certain large shares, scanning with a single thread can take a long time to complete. For such shares, Data Insight lets you use multiple parallel scanning threads within a scan process to enable faster scans.
To configure parallel scanning for a collector or a filer from the Advanced Settings page:
See Configuring advanced settings.
To configure multiple threads to scan a single share:
See Add New Share/Edit Share options .
Enabling multiple threads for a scan process has certain performance implications for the collector and the filer.
The following considerations apply when you enable parallel scanning for one or more shares on a collector:
It is recommended that the collector meets the following system requirements for running multi-threaded scans:
As a precautionary measure to avoid excessive load on the filers, Data Insight runs a maximum of four multi-threaded scans in parallel on a collector regardless of the value configured on the Advanced Settings page.
Based on your scanning requirements and available system resources, you can set the number of scan threads that you want Data Insight to use in parallel within a share from the Add New Share/Edit Share page. Data Insight interprets the scan thread count as follows:
When a parallel scan is configured for certain shares, those shares are scanned faster. However, higher number of parallel scan threads may introduce a resource overhead on the filers. Thus, ensure that you do not set an excessively high value.
It is recommended that the DatainsightComm service should be stopped only after the parallel scans are completed. Or, on the next restart of the service, the parallel scan automatically starts a fresh scan.
If you edit a share to use parallel scanner instead of the single-threaded scanner while scanning is in the running or paused state, the single-threaded scan continues to run till it completes. For the subsequent full scans, the parallel scanner is executed. If you need to start using the parallel scanner immediately, then you must cancel the current scan from the Settings > Scan Status> In-Progress Scan page and restart the scan.
The following limitations apply for the parallel scanner.
Support for incremental scan is not available. Only full scans are supported.
Support for NFS shares is not available.
Support for filtering out shares based on the Exclude Rules configuration is not available.
Support for throttling of parallel scans for NetApp 7-mode and Cluster-Mode file servers is not available.
The Scan History sub-tab on the Scanning dashboard does not display the historical details of a parallel scan.
For Windows File Server agents version older than 5.2, the parallel scanner cannot be executed. Even if it is configured, the single thread scan runs.