Kamar disk space?

[Craig Knights]

Hi, we're heading for a Kamar install.

Planning on putting it on our very new Mac Mini server.  It's 256GB SSD is mostly full of cached updates.  So I'm thinking of a purchasing a Thunderbolt drive, either SSD or HDD.  But how big?  Or plan to expand it later?

We're a 525 pupil school, the Kamar administrator person wants plenty of space.

thanks,

Craig

[Keith Craig]

Craig,

Put the operating System on the external then use the SSD as your FileMaker data drive.

Regards

Keith

Keith Craig

Systems Administrator

Dilworth School

Mob: +64 21 541549

Office: +64 9 5231060 x843

Sent from my iPhone

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[Tim Harper]

Hi Craig,

we have Kamar running on a VM.  The drive sizes are:

The Kamar live files are on the E: drive and backups are on F:  Additionally everything is backed up via Shadow Protect.  We are a roll of ~750.

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 443 1236
Fax 03 443 0491

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

[Tim Harper]

Do you really want that number of rewrites to the SSD?

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 443 1236
Fax 03 443 0491

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

[Craig Knights]

Yes that was something I was considering..

ta

CJK

>> Do you really want that number of rewrites to the SSD?

[Bevan McNaughton]

External drives are just another point of failure really.

You could opt for iSCSI on a NAS box to the server. That way you'll have RAID for the data and some (say 4-disk NAS) allow for SSD as caching so can be quite fast.

Bevan McNaughton

Intranet Manager

Southland Girls' High School

328 Tweed Street

Invercargill 9812

Phone: +64 3 211 6030

Fax: +64 3 216 9010

[Andrew Godfrey]

The backups take up a large amount of space with hourly, daily and weekly copies of the whole database. You'll probably want something other than your main OS/app location for this but not too slow. We have a main database of 5GB and are using quite a bit of our 100GB backup drive for backup storage. 

We've just added the F drive for storage of notes attachments which is a fairly new feature so we now have 4 drives for OS+apps, Filemaker data, backups, attachments.

Here is what our virtualized MS2008 server thinks it's got:

The first three drives are on a SAS RAID10 set and the last on a SAS RAID5+1 set.

We also put the web portal on a different box as we wanted Kamar to be fast and reliable.

_______________________________________

 

Andrew Godfrey  |  Network Manager  |  Burnside High School  |  Christchurch | New Zealand

On 12 May 2015 at 12:23, Craig Knights <craig....@gmail.com> wrote:

[Patrick Dunford]

I know you’re a big school but this isn’t Musac with daily corruptions. It’s questionable anyone needs an hourly backup.

 

--
Patrick Dunford
System Administrator
IDSGT Ltd
itsu...@hillview.school.nz
Ext 224 / 027 601 7163

[Andrew Godfrey]

I would rather just install a few more GB of drive space than cross my fingers and hope that the worst won't happen.

_______________________________________

 

Andrew Godfrey  |  Network Manager  |  Burnside High School  |  Christchurch | New Zealand

[Tim Harper]

We have the web portal on the same server but I built a different virtual server to host remote access.

Kamar itself makes the backups to the F: drive using it's settings; then we back up the F: drive only.

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 443 1236
Fax 03 443 0491

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

On 12 May 2015 at 13:17, Patrick Dunford <kahuk...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Kent Lendrum]

Hi Patrick,

Backups aren’t about corruption - they are for the ‘un-oh’ moments  (eg. Find & Replace on the wrong class).  You can never have enough backups, but ideally you never need them.

Also, backups use Hard Links for files that haven’t changed since the last run,  so the actual size on disk is less than the actual DB Size x Number backups as a result.

Given the original MacMini question and 256GB SSD setup, one option could be:

- Partition into two drives:  OS on one and Live files on other partition.

- Use external drive for backups and update cache

Tim mentioned the limited writes with a SSD drive and this is worth considering - the OS itself does a number of rewrites (cache files, prefs, etc) - however the SSD should handle this without any data loss.  Plus, the more RAM cache you allocate, the less disk access will be involved.  Writes are done in the background,  so a slower disk shouldn’t impact significantly on write performance - it’s only reads that aren’t already in cache where disk performance is important.

The biggest impact is Apple’s decision to reduce the MacMini from the previous 4 core processor to the slightly faster, but only 2 core processor.

regards

Kent.

On 12/05/2015, at 1:17 pm, Patrick Dunford <kahuk...@gmail.com> wrote:

I know you’re a big school but this isn’t Musac with daily corruptions. It’s questionable anyone needs an hourly backup.

 

--
Patrick Dunford
System Administrator
IDSGT Ltd
itsu...@hillview.school.nz
Ext 224 / 027 601 7163

 

From: Andrew Godfrey

Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2015 1:15 PM

To: techies-f...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: [techies-for-schools] Kamar disk space?

 

The backups take up a large amount of space with hourly, daily and weekly copies of the whole database. You'll probably want something other than your main OS/app location for this but not too slow. We have a main database of 5GB and are using quite a bit of our 100GB backup drive for backup storage. 

 

We've just added the F drive for storage of notes attachments which is a fairly new feature so we now have 4 drives for OS+apps, Filemaker data, backups, attachments.

 

Here is what our virtualized MS2008 server thinks it's got:

 

<image.png>

[Simon - OBHS]

Are you set on using it your mac server?

Runs fine on Windows!

49 of that 50GB is KAMAR and its backups and of that 42GB is just the backups. Looking at the weekly backups over 5 weeks, it increased by 100MB of data.

This server is replicated to our second VM host every 15 mins as well as being backed up every night with veeam.

This is after 17 months of usage in an 800 pupil school.

[Craig Knights]

Nah, I was just trying to pick the fastest one..  But which one that is, is debatable...

We've got Windows options too..

[Patrick Dunford]

Yes, you can have too many backups, because the load on the server from running lots of backups can affect performance for the users.

[Robert Baird]

Make sure your OS and live KAMAR DB is on a raided array of some kind. The Mac Mini (sadly) no longer comes with a RAID option built-in, which means the only way to use the Mini as an effective server would be to ignore the SSD drive for anything important, and host everything on iSCSI/DAS. Drive failures happen, even on SSD.

If you look up the benchmarks you'll find that the 2012 Mac Mini's are faster than the new ones. Not joking.  

Factor in the turnaround for repairing a failure as well. Busted RAM modules, PSU, logic board etc with 2+ week fix time are acceptable on consumer grade hardware, especially the custom high-specced variants. In an emergency a VM is easy to quickly chuck on any old hardware while you wait for repairs, something you can't achieve as easily with bare-metal. 

[Blake Richardson]

Our Kamar here runs on a Mac Mini Server (2 x 1TB HDD) that are in a RAID 1 configuration. Currently including the OS we are using just under 100GB. We also have our student portal hosted on another machine as we had issues with FM13 and having it all on the one machine.

[Dave Young]

Hi Craig 

We have Kamar on a miniMac server (just don the road from you).

If you want to look at our set up just email.

Backups run on a 500GB Thunderbolt drive  plus some other remote backups weekly etc.

Dave

On Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at 12:13:27 PM UTC+12, craig.knights wrote:

[Ict Technician]

DON'T

kamar/filemaker do not work on mac hardware reliably. We did the same last year, and now we have it running on windows server 2012. It has stopped crashing...

On Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at 12:13:27 PM UTC+12, craig.knights wrote:

[Mike Etheridge]

Strange. We don’t have many problems - not working on a mac mini however, we are on a middle-aged quad core Xeon. New mac mini models are not flash compared with the older ones, I’m hoping Apple will revisit this issue and realise people do want a capable multicore machine in this compact format. You are aware that Filemaker is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple? The Filemaker/Apple platform one is a common one worldwide. You don’t need the server version of the OS to run FM Server BTW. Runs fine on the workstation OS.

Mike

[Keith Craig]

Likewise - we have been running Kamar on Mac servers since the days of Filemaker Server 5.5 and never had any problems attributable to it being on a Mac.

Keith Craig BCom PGDipBus(IS) CNE
Systems Administrator 

Phone +64 9 5231060 x843 Mobile +64 (0) 21541549

[Patrick Dunford]

I think you mean "cheap" rather than "compact". The fact is the current model is very compact - and it can't do that and be a whiz-bang server at the same time. There are no advantages of "compact" for a server I can think of, and a lot of disadvantages.

[WHS Ict Technician]

It was great for us until we had to move away from 10.6.8 and our xserve hardware. Nothing but trouble since.

[Patrick Dunford]

Just curious why? at a server level I assume there is not such an objective to need the latest and greatest?

On 28/10/2015 1:52 PM, WHS Ict Technician wrote:

It was great for us until we had to move away from 10.6.8 and our xserve hardware. Nothing but trouble since.

--

[WHS Ict Technician]

KAMAR stopped compiling updates that included support for the 10.6.8 libraries (they shifted their macs to the latest OS and lost a lot of legacy library support)

So even though i could run the latest filemaker (at the time) with a few tweaks, KAMAR itself broke. It took a few months of crashes on update before we figured out why, so then we got the macmini and it was downhill from there.

[Craig Knights]

Ended up with a xeon powered dell. Windows 2012. All good.

[Patrick Dunford]

Everyone is trying to push you to cloud, no one can be bothered much with in house servers any more. Next thing the ministry will stop buying license deals for server OSs.

[WHS Ict Technician]

We've got a xeon powered Lenovo running windows 2012. all good here too, now.

[Mike Etheridge]

The previous mac mini lineup included a quad core model that is running perfectly well here as a server right now, not an FM server but it has a fair load. The new models are dual core. The days when a capable server had to be a great big full depth 8U hunk of rack mount iron are long gone.

Mike

[Keith Craig]

When we were moving Kamar server from Xserve to Mac Mini a few years I did some unscientific testing comparing the speeds and found that even for the most intensive tasks – generating reports the client made more difference than the server. I was not able to test the difference between servers with 50 people logged in. I think in this scenario the disk architecture would make the bigger difference than processor, however I have a generous RAM cache set on Filemaker server.

Keith Craig BCom PGDipBus(IS) CNE
Systems Administrator 

Phone +64 9 5231060 x843 Mobile +64 (0) 21541549

From: <techies-f...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Mike Etheridge <m.eth...@pnghs.school.nz>
Reply-To: <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday, 28 October 2015 2:29 pm
To: <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [techies-for-schools] Re: Kamar disk space?

[WHS Ict Technician]

Given that KAMAR is going to be a central service that has to be up, and that it will probably end up driving user/authentication across a range of services, I don't know why you'd risk it on non-server hardware. I've  finished stress testing our retired quad core macmini and i'm seeing memory errors, that's on a machine that's been in use a year. I may have just been unlucky, but soft errors on non-ECC memory are common, you'd expect to see a fair few in the lifetime of a machine.

The only reason we went with a mac mini was inertia and cost. In retrospect, moving away from apple hardware/software sooner would have been a cheaper alternative.

I did the testing on throughput/performance and was unconvinced LACP and a fast raid would make any difference to performance, but it actually makes the whole load up time far quicker. (from 20s+ to under a second). I noticed with the mac mini that the powerd would often go out of control and jam the whole box up.

[Patrick Dunford]

If you want to run capable 3.5" SAS disks in RAID arrays you can't fit them inside the chassis or they are simply not available in 2.5". If you want to add other peripherals they won't fit inside the chassis. So all these things have to be strung off cables sitting somewhere else, and they end up taking up just as much space as the 5 RU server array chassis we have too. How about a redundant dual power supply? All these options are mainstream in PC servers. I'm not going to suggest that something which is effectively a laptop internally with the same form factor restrictions as a laptop can ever replace a real server.

We can do all that in a tower chassis not much bigger than a mid sized PC tower - 5 rack units, which doesn't have to go in a rack. There are limits to small - they just become harder to service and repair and you end up paying more just for the compact form factor or sexy look. Maybe it works if you only need one server in your whole site, but these days virtualising all the different servers in a site onto one big well-specced virtualisation host is the way to go and there is no way you'll run that on a compact device.

[Mike Etheridge]

mac mini is not “non server Hardware”, whatever that means. Some mac mini models were sold specifically as servers, with two HDD and no optical, quad core processor, etc. The quad core models sold at the same time were identical hardware apart fro having an optical drive and single HDD.

The biggest, and only serious ever, server failure on this site was an HP model sold as "server hardware".

Mike

[Mike Etheridge]

Well, that’s pretty contentious…

[Mike Etheridge]

I guess these guys

must be wrong, if you are right…

[WHS Ict Technician]

people use phones and raspberry pi's as servers, doesn't mean they are made for it! How that particular bunch get good value /energy efficiency for their  money, i don't know.

[WHS Ict Technician]

http://hackaday.com/2015/07/31/44-mac-pros-racked-up-to-replace-each-rack-of-64-mac-minis/

same site

On Wednesday, October 28, 2015 at 3:15:51 PM UTC+13, Mike Etheridge wrote:

[WHS Ict Technician]

Sorry Mike, you got me investigating.

The reason they have those macs is to use the graphics cards, because they've invested their time into OSX based software. According to their tech, there's advantages to using OSX's graphics routines which they'd have to re-code for to get to work with, say, a cuda setup.

So that has nothing to do with being servers, and everything to do with being cheap OSX graphics bases.

one word: ECC

macmini doesn't have it.


"

Simon Kuhn says:

The big reason to use OS X for this kind of work is to leverage its graphics frameworks in your production pipeline. It’s pretty powerful to be able to compile a shader and perform all the operations in one pass on an image, rather than resizing, then sharpening, then adjusting contrast, etc. This lets us do a lot of work simultaneously, which I think is pretty important for an on-demand image manipulation service like imgix.

With that said, we aren’t just a light wrapper around CoreGraphics — we have a bunch of smart people working on our image rendering pipeline and we’re doing a lot of things that CoreGraphics can’t natively do. But we do stand on their shoulders to an extent — Apple also smart people working on this, and they’ve had much longer to work on the problem.

(I am imgix’s datacenter manager)

You’re right, at some point we will reach an inflection point where it makes sense to port rather than continue developing these type of rack designs. Right now, the math doesn’t add up, but we’re flexible and nimble. When it makes sense, we’ll adjust our roadmap accordingly."

[Patrick Dunford]

Sure, 64 of those are equivalent to what spec of PC server? Meaningless without knowing how they make that work.

[Patrick Dunford]

I think you have to make a distinction between different kinds of servers. ECC is an optional hardware feature that is used in some server applications. So are RAID disks and redundant power supplies. Not all servers use them because they are optional features. You could find those capabilities available in high-end workstations - some "desktop" boards or chassis have features like those as well.

[Blake Richardson]

You do realise FileMaker is owned by Apple Computer inc........

[Patrick Dunford]

That means nothing at all, just because Apple own it doesn't mean it works better on their overpriced Wintel hardware.

On 29/10/2015 09:40, Blake Richardson wrote:

You do realise FileMaker is owned by Apple Computer inc........

[J B]

Ahh, that explains dropping the older hardware support then :)

Sent from my Windows Phone

---

From: Patrick Dunford
Sent: ‎10/‎29/‎2015 10:05 AM

To: techies-f...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [techies-for-schools] Re: Kamar disk space?

[Matthew Strickland]

Hi Craig,

~850 students

I run on a virtual 2012R2 and allocated:

40GB for OS (11GB used)

10GB Database (1.6GB used)

100GB Backup (50GB used)

OS is a minimum install, FM server and prerequisites only.

Each drive is a separate virtual drive so I can resize, migrate datastores as needed.

I nightly backup the backup drive to a NAS.

I don't think I've seen our database go beyond 2GB yet.

Matt

[Craig Knights]

We put it on a shiny new Windows server last term.  It's all going great.

thanks,

Craig

[Matthew Strickland]

Just clicked how old the post was!

Good to hear its running well, I don't have any issues with FM server, uptime is usually several months until I manually stop and perform OS updates.

Matt

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to techies-for-schools+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Blake Richardson]

We run our on a Mac Mini Server which has the 1TB HDD's in a RAID 1 array. Our backups run to the internal drive with is also backed up elsewhere onsite as well as off site. We also backup to a 32GB SD card thats in the machine as another fail safe. 

Our student portal is hosted on a separate machine.