[ale] Example large generic website for load testing?

Thu Sep 1 11:44:08 EDT 2016

Since you're planning on doing an rsync anyway why bother with NFS mounts?  Just rsync from one server to the other over that 10 GB connection.

In my experience I have far more trust in SAN than LAN so NFS wouldn't be my choice unless I had no SAN storage available.   Having said that we do use NFSv4 for our data deduplication backup appliances (ExaGrid) over 10 GB and both our backups and our restores since going to ExaGrid last year our actually outperforming backups to tape over SAN.   Of course a lot of this has to do with the deduplication/compression done on the ExaGrids themselves.   The technology for this kind of appliance has improved greatly over what we had from older Data Domain and Quantum DXi appliances.   (Not to say newer versions of those might not perform well - we didn't test newer ones when we went the ExaGrid route due to other considerations.) 

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Beddingfield, Allen
Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2016 9:45 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Example large generic website for load testing?

In this case for this test, the ONLY thing I care about is disk i/o performance.  Here's why:
We currently have a setup where multiple physical web servers behind an A10 load balancer are SAN attached and sharing  an OCFS2 filesystem on the SAN for the Apache data directory.  This houses sites that administration has determined to be mission-critical in the event of an emergency/disaster/loss of either datacenter.
I'm wanting to replace that with VMs mounting an NFS share across a 10GB connection (also repurposing the old physicals as web servers), but I want to test the performance of it first.  

New requirements for this are:
1.  Must be available in the event of a SAN failure or storage network failure in either or both datacenters 2.  Cannot be fully dependent on the VMware vSphere environment 3.  Must be able to run from either datacenter independently of the other.

So...
1 Physical host in each location for NFS storage - rsync+cron job to keep primary and standby datacenter in sync.

A pair of standalone virtualization hosts in each location, running the VMs from local storage, and mounting the NFS shares from the server(s) above.

Load balancer handling the failover between the two (we currently have this working with the existing servers, but it is configured by someone else, and pretty much a black box of magic from my perspective).

Oh, there is a second clustered/load balanced setup for database high availability, if you were wondering about that...

The rest of it is already proven to work - I am just a bit concerned about the performance of using NFS.  We've already built a mock-up of this whole setup with retired/repurposed servers, and if it works acceptably from a 6+ year old server, I know it will be fine when I order new hardware.
--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
Office of Information Technology
The University of Alabama
Office 205-348-2251
allen at ua.edu

On 8/31/16, 10:16 PM, "ale-bounces at ale.org on behalf of Mark at markulmer.com " <ale-bounces at ale.org on behalf of mark at markulmer.com> wrote:

    Allen,
    Beyond just raw power testing ... I always like to suggest security requirements now. I suggest that penetration testing of server group be done before, during and after your load testing. Regarding SSL, having only the right ciphers enabled and disabled, decryption performance, etc are important tasks onto themselves. Also best to know how specific DOS and DDOS techniques affect you before any apps are introduced. What about any devices that maybe put in-line, such as IPS, IDS, HIDS, SSL decryption, caching proxy, web application firewall, xml gateways, file scanning, federated sign in, etc? You will want to include these all in the load testing.  

    Good Luck,
    Mark Ulmer, CISSP

    > On Aug 31, 2016, at 4:27 PM, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu> wrote:
    > 
    > I am looking for an example generic website that could be used for testing purposes.  I thought that some sort of a thing would exist somewhere in the wild, but I'm not really finding anything.  Essentially, I have a group of web servers behind a load balancer, I want to put a web site with a lot of links, random images, etc... on them, and hammer against the with JMeter.  The goal is a performance test of the filesystem on the web servers/performance of them, more than the load balancer, etc...
    > 
    > 
    > Anyone know of any sort of examples/templates that exist for that sort of testing?  If not, I'm just going to have to start looking for large sites on some of our shared web servers to copy off and use for this.
    > 
    > Thanks.
    > Allen B.
    > 
    > 
    > 
    > -- 
    > Allen Beddingfield
    > Systems Engineer
    > Office of Information Technology
    > The University of Alabama
    > Office 205-348-2251
    > allen at ua.edu
    > 
    > 
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