> Hi folks,
>
> Do you know of any Linux Virtual Server Cluster installations on a
> production environment?
>
> I need the hi-availability, but don't have any money. The LVS seems to be a
> good candidate... a cluster with 4/5 machines running proprietary software
> and oracle db's. I would greatly appreciate anyone sharing their
> experiences or pointers to other people.
It sounds to me that you are looking for a roll-your-own solution.
Start with the beowulf howto on your CD, and www.beowulf.org. Basically
you need a box, CPU(s), RAM and NIC (or equivalent) per station. DISKS,
Video cards, screens etc are optional extras (though the boss box needs
everything, of course).
> Also, i need to be able to estimate the cluster performance. Capacity
> planning estimates that, at peak, future writes to the file system
> (software-based Linux RAID’s) would be in the order of a sustained 5Mbps.
> I’m not quite sure that that is possible in a cluster configuration where
> the RAID box is not shared by the machines, but I need some numbers to back
> it up.
It's not much of a guide, I know, but hdparm reports that I can read at
16.7 Mbytes/sec from my EIDE IBM UDMA/66 (7200) drive that's attached to a
UDMA/33 interface.
My aging Maxtor 8.4 Gbyte drive runs at around 10 Mbytes/sec (Pentium 133,
UDMA/33).
Here's what Bonnie says about these drives:
[summer@possum summer]$ time bonnie -d /tmp/BuildRPM/ -s 300 -m PII-233
File '/tmp/BuildRPM//Bonnie.11864', size: 314572800
Writing with putc()...done
Rewriting...done
Writing intelligently...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
Seeker 1...Seeker 2...Seeker 3...start 'em...done...done...done...
-------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input--
--Random--
-Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block---
--Seeks---
Machine MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec
%CPU
PII-233 300 1700 45.1 14231 28.8 1068 2.0 857 21.1 1004 1.0 74.2
0.9
P-133 150 996 49.4 6518 36.3 2899 32.1 1052 48.5 9571 43.6 80.2
3.4
Bonnie was written by one of the folks working on the New Oxford English
Dictionary to stress disk I/O on Unix. Probably a disk (or RAID) that
performs well with Bonnie will perform well with Oracle too, though I
would not extrapolate performance numbers.
I have version 1.0; it's available from
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au./disks/.56/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-3.4-relea
se/All/bonnie-1.0.tgz
There are various tarballs in the area varying in size by a few bytes. I
found an src.rpm, but there's only one source file to compile, and the rpm
wasn't put together well.
There are also these:
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/disk-management/bonnie++1.00.tgz
ftp://ftp.uwa.edu.au/mirrors/linux/debian/dists/slink/main/source/utils/bon
nie_1.orig.tar.gz
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au./disks/.53/debian/dists/woody/main/source/utils
/bonnie_2.0.6-big.orig.tar.gz
They vary in size; none is big.
I find I'm sorely tempted to build a box based on a BP6 (dual Celeron to
500) and up to eight UDMA drives (half each 33 & 66). The BP6 is only a
little dearer than the BE6; for a little more than a basic Celeron system
I could build a screamer. One could build a whole box for less than the
cost of an Athlon 800.
Finally
1 There's an interesting ad in the Linux Magazine on my desk; see
http://www.penguincomputing.com/resonate
2 Vendors such as IBM, DELL, SGI, HP and (I think) Compaq officially
support Linux on their hardware. Ask them for ideas. ASL (also advertising
in LM) also make some claims; see http://www.aslab.com/
Note: I recommend neither for nor against those manufacturers.
--
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
Configuration, networking, combined IBM ftpsites index.
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