Spec'ing out a new Linux Synergy server - suggestions?
Hoyland, Nigel
Hi All,
We are currently using 7.1 on a Windows server, but I have been pushing for ages to move the backend over to a Linux server, especially seeing as we are starting to need to support Linux Synergy clients (we currently have an under-powered Linux VM server that we DCM to cater for the small Linux-based team) down the road.
Seeing as this is a greenfield opportunity, we have been trying to put together a server spec that would stand us in good stead going forwards. We currently have about 75 or so users that really use Change (max concurrent was 22) and around the same number that use Synergy, so certainly not a big user community. We do though allow connection from different geographically-distributed sites (including the East coast and India).
Here’s the initial spec…
· Model: HP DL380 G7
· 2 processors: each are Xeon 5690 3.46 Ghz 6 core
· 32G/64G Ram
· Either 7x2 mirrored array of 146G SAS disk OR a 2x2 array of 600G SAS disks (not decided yet)
· 2 application disks (which will be mirrored): 1T or larger SATA 7.2K rpm (this is overkill in terms of size, but storage is cheap-ish!)
A couple of questions/suggestions arose…
1. Looks like we are going with RAID 10 for the database disks (compared with RAID 5 that IT have suggested) – I see this as the only way to go, as compared with RAID 5. Do you agree?
2. As has been suggested by one of the managers here, is there any performance to be had by partitioning of the database tables at the Synergy/Informix level, to dedicate spindles to particular projects. Personally, I feel that this is overkill (seeing as we don’t have that many users), and am not sure if it possible, seeing as Informix is very embedded with Synergy (I can count on one hand the numbers of times I have had to login as user Informix to sort issues out). Could we achieve this using Informix, or would we have to move to Oracle as our RDBMS? Has anyone done this?
How have you set up Synergy on Linux/Unix in terms of storage, configuration, etc, to improve performance?
I have heard that WAN performance and backup speed is greatly improved in 7.2 (latest patch level – after reading Peter’s thread on performance!), so we are looking forward to upgrading!
Your suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!
Cheers,
Nige
-----------------------------------------------
Nigel Hoyland
Software Configuration Manager, R&D
Covidien
Energy-based Devices
303-476-7409 (Office)
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MORGENTHALER, Peter
Hi,
A few comments. DON’T go RAID 10 if you want disk redundancy. Whilst a RAID 10 can recover from a 2 disk failure it will depend on which disks. If you lose the wrong combination of disks you will lose 100% and have to restore from backup and completely rebuild the array. I would suggest RAID 6 with a good hardware controller if you want online disk replacement etc.
We currently run a HP G5 quad core 2CPU Xeon with 16-32G RAM with Mirror raid for the boot partition and RAID 6 for the data partitions. We run Informix as our DB with RESIDENT set to 1. Runs pretty well. The benchmark I have published was for a server speck’ed similar to this running on a slow network. We will be publishing more results soon from other servers.
From my point of view you are 100% on the money for your server config (except for the RAID 10).
Hope that helps
Peter
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Hoyland, Nigel
Thanks Peter!
Where RAID 10 came from (over the IT dept suggested RAID 5) is really what I have read on the web. Every article I came across said DO NOT use RAID 5 for database, use RAID 10 instead. Didn’t look into RAID 6!
Do you have any thoughts on the “…partitioning of the database tables at the Synergy/Informix level, to dedicate spindles to particular projects” idea? Does it make any sense? Is it possible to configure it this way? Is this pointless unless you have many 100s/1000s of users?
Cheers,
Nige
MORGENTHALER, Peter
Just for reference here is an article on RAID 6 vs RAID 10
http://serverfault.com/questions/120210/raid-6-vs-raid-10-which-would-you-choose
MORGENTHALER, Peter
Nigel,
With regards to portioning different chunks to different sindles. I have never bother because RAID 6 will scatter the data across drives anyway. If you were really paranoid you could setup 4x6RAID arraus (min of 4x4 Disks) and have each chunk file on a different RAID 6 array.. this would technically improve speed BUT I personally don’t think this will be your bottle neck. If you really want to increase your speed put SSD’s in but you probably don’t have the budget to do that J. In most cases your network will be your bottle neck and you will probably have your server idling most of the time. I know our is!
Hoyland, Nigel
Awesome Peter…thank you!
Just to be clear, we do NOT require true 24X7 availability (although that is obviously nice to have) and we can deal with the occasional outage, but we need to be able to recover fairly quickly. We do NOT have a huge data storage requirement and thus the extra cost of RAID 10 is not a factor. Thus, here’s why I was suggesting RAID 10 over RAID 6. I’m a RAID newbie, so feel free to jump on any untruths!! ;o)
Positives (of RAID 10 over RAID 6)
· Better performance
· Quicker to recover when failure occurs (as no parity to calculate)
Negatives (comparing RAID 10 to RAID 6)
· RAID 10 needs more disks to implement and reduces capacity (this is NOT an issue for us, as we probably only need 1Tb of effective disk space, so 2X7 146Gb SAS is sufficient)
· More likely to have to revert to tape backup to recover if more than one disk suffers a failure? (Depends on many factors though and can be got round by having dedicated, “hot” spare drive)
That make sense?
Understanding this, do you think we’re correct in going for a nested RAID (RAID 10) rather than RAID 6?
MORGENTHALER, Peter
My thoughts..
If you have a catastrophic failure.. eg 2 or more disks fail..
if you are on RAID 10 you are putting 2 new disks in and probably restoring from Backup.. guess outage time approx. (3 hours min)
if you are on RAID 6 you are hot swapping 2 new disk and keep on working but lose performance of the RAID array but that night you could rebuild the array from scratch (quick) and restore backup (say 3 hours min but at your choosing of time).
RAID 6 has a 6 times write penalty and RAID 10 has a 2X write penalty. RAID 10 definitely winner here. Read penalty is minor for RAID 6.
My guess/opinion is that most of synergy IO will be reads not writes..(happy for anyone to argue differently) eg you will only write when you sync in/create a new tasks.. you will read (update from the server) far more often eg one team members write time equals all of your teams reading .. so I would focus on the read performance.
So long as you have reliable tape backup RAID 10 should be fine.. for business continuity I would always go RAID 6 (make sure you have a dedicated Hardware RAID controller with lots of cache and the parity is less of an issue.)
Hope the helps..
Hoyland, Nigel
Wow…it does Peter! You are THE man! ;o)
I’ve got a meeting tomorrow with IS, so I’ll try and sound intelligent and know what I’m talking about. Without them knowing, I’ll just be reading your emails from below the table! ;o)
Thanks again…
william.d...@gm.com
Thanks in advance.
Bill Richards
Sr. Project Engineer - Tools
GM IT
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Ruediger...@jci.com
ccm query -t task "not is_task_in_folder_of(is_folder_in_rp_of(type='project') and not is_task_in_rp_of(type='project'))"
OR
ccm query -t task "not is_task_in_baseline_of(type='baseline')"
I have to admit that finding tasks not in a baseline would not be a very useful (or complete) query for me .. (so I haven't used above queries) .. I'd probably would have to filter for status (=completed) or for a certain user or a certain project. Either way, hope that syntax gets you started ;)
-Rudi.
David Honey
You might try:
ccm query -t task "is_no_task_in_baseline() and is_no_dirty_task_in_baseline()"
Best regards,
David.
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Appreciate the assistance.