[ale] Example large generic website for load testing?

[Beddingfield, Allen]

Actually, I'm not trying to work around potential SAN issues so much.  Our team manages the SAN, and we have a huge investment in it (Compellent well in excess of a Petabyte here, and another one slightly less large in Atlanta).  Other than a couple of minor issues, it has been solid.  However, the requirements for this setup (we call this "core web services") are for it to be able to function given a failure of any or all of the following:  vSPhere, SAN, storage network.

-- 
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
Office of Information Technology
The University of Alabama
Office 205-348-2251
allen at ua.edu


On 9/1/16, 11:32 AM, "ale-bounces at ale.org on behalf of DJ-Pfulio" <ale-bounces at ale.org on behalf of DJPfulio at jdpfu.com> wrote:

    
    
    SANs are a blessing and a curse.
    
    When they work, they work very well, but in highly dynamic environments
    with lots of new/old systems being swapped, crap happens and there is
    always the firmware upgrade issue with SANs and SAN storage.  With
    hundreds of servers connected, sometimes it just isn't possible to
    upgrade the firmware (anywhere in the chain) due to incompatibilities
    and a fork-lift upgrade is the only way. Newer systems work with newer
    SAN storage and older systems, which cannot be touched, stay on the old
    storage as long as possible. Of course, this brings in power, cooling,
    and space issues for most DCs. Can't just leave old stuff in there.
    Virtualization helps greatly with this stuff, unless each VM is directly
    attaching to storage.
    
    If Allen isn't in control of the SAN, I can see why he'd shy away from
    using it. Especially if that team hasn't been great support. Not saying
    that is the situation and my systems have been extremely lucky with
    fantastic SAN/Storage team support over the years (except once, during a
    nasty daytime outage).
    
    None of this probably matters to Allen.
    
    > 
    > 
    > -----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. --
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