Does KAMAR run well on a virtual server?

[Paul Seiler]

Twice recently my team have been told that KAMAR does not run well on
a virtual server. Once this came from a school and the second time
from a vendor but to us via a schools. The second time the quote was
"From our experience Kamar does not perform well under a virtualised
server environment, hence the recommendation to provide Kamar with its
own dedicated server."

For my own learning and to get better outcomes for schools I asked the
vendor of KAMAR about this.His response is copied below. I hope this
will provoke a little sharing (on your experiences) and questions.


Hi Paul,

We have a number of schools using KAMAR on a virtual server, with no
noticeable performance issues.

Likewise - we have a few schools using KAMAR - who have moved to a
virtual server and suddenly experience slow-downs that they didn't
prior on a dedicated server.

When we view the statistics in FileMaker Server, the issues appear to
be linked to delays with writing to the Hard Drive.

I'll give an example I was dealing with recently.

The school technician (who didn't set the VM server up, it was
supplied and configured by their IT support company) contacted me
because their staff were complaining about slow access since changing
to a Virtual Server at the start of this year. A brand new VM server,
with all the bells and whistles.

- FileMaker Server was reporting excessive wait time / call (seconds,
when we normally expect micro seconds)
- Backups were taking several minutes

Their backup was approx 1Gb in size, consisting of about 50 files.

We did the following tests on the virtual server running FileMaker
Server / KAMAR :
- The technician copied a KAMAR Backup - it took nearly 4 minutes -
this is copy on same drive !
- Technician mounted the drive, and copied the same backup to his
local machine. It took about 40 seconds over a 1000Bt network
connection, 2 switches away
- Technician copied the same backup back up to the server - it took
over 4 minutes to copy back

Note : this wasn't anything to do with using KAMAR / FileMaker - just
a plain file copy in the Windows 2008 OS

As a comparison, I copied 1.11Gb (200 files) using our own Virtual
Server :
- copy on same drive : 23 seconds
- Copy over network to my local machine : 45 seconds (1000Bt
connection, same switch)
- Copy over network back to server : 32 seconds

The technician came to the same conclusion I had - as a database
application, which is constantly reading / writing to disk - FileMaker
was going slow because writes to the hard drive on their virtual
server itself were slow.

I haven't heard back from this school, but I believe the slowdown
schools report are mostly linked to :
1) Configuration of Hard Drives (pre-allocated)
2) Other demands on the VM Host, which are using CPU / Network / Disk
resources
3) Symantec Endpoint Protection not configured to exclude appropriate
file paths


regards

Kent.

[Gerard MacManus]

When Papatoetoe High school went virtual we disucssed this with our support company, we have two setups on our SAN for this, a disk array and a database array. However for our KAMAR setup we still run on a dedicated machine.

from a http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/tip/Optimize-SAN-setup-for-improved-SQL-Server-performance

Storage area networks, or SANs, are widely used to store data for SQL Server installations with large databases. SANs are one of the most economical ways to deal with very large data sets. They're designed to scale better in this regard than disk arrays installed directly on the host. However, setting up SQL Server databases on a SAN requires some awareness on the part of the database administrator about the way SANs work. You can't simply dump a database onto the SAN and expect to get the same results you've been getting.

 

Gerard

[Peter Lambrechtsen]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Paul Seiler <paul....@minedu.govt.nz> wrote:

I know St Marys Wellington have been running Kamar on Windows 2003 32 Bit in a XEN VM for around the last 3 years and no major complaints about performance.  I'm currently working where my personal time permits to migrate them over to ESXi.  So far we have noticed a tangible improvement from moving off XEN using OCFS onto ESXi.

My employer who runs a number of ESXi clusters with in excess of 150 VMs runs the majority of their MS SQL Instances in ESXi cluster rather than on physical servers.  So as long as you were running on enterprise grade hardware (CPU/Memory/High speed SAN - at least 10k, preferably 15k disks) and having them appropriately tuned then there should be only marginal difference between running it on physical hardware.  Most times I have noticed a performance increase when running on a ESXi server than a physical server since normally the ESXi server is a lot higher spec than the single stand-alone server.

As pointed out #3, Anti-Virus / Endpoint protection apps can significantly negatively impact performance of Databases so should be setup to exclude the Database directories.

[Kees Fransen]

Hi All,

I support a number of schools running KAMAR in a VM. All sites that I
maintain use Citrix XenServer and the OS varies between 2k8R2 and
2k3R2. As Peter stated above, we find that there is normally a
performance increase as the host has higher grade hardware.

In XenServer you can specify the type of virtual disk that KAMAR is
stored on (VHD or LVM). In a recent deployment I chose LVM as is
performs slightly better with DB applications, this decision was made
because the site use of KAMAR is higher compared to other schools we
manage. Other sites use the default virtual disk and perform
similarly. It is also important to make sure there are separate disks
for KAMAR, its backups and the OS (in both physical and virtual
environments).

One other thing is to make sure that the KAMAR VM is not running on a
host where there is another VM that uses the hard drive heavily (other
DB, Print servers, etc). They will compete for disk access and impact
on performance.

Kees

[Paul Seiler]

Gerard, Peter and Kees, thanks for sharing from your experiences. It
does seem that KAMAR can run well on a virtual machine, although there
seem to be some tricks.

What else can others share on this matter?

Paul.

[Tim Harper]

As always buy the best hardware you can afford.  Disk systems, SAN and RAM, NICs etc are all critical components.  Look to separate out critical services with eg print spoolers on one disk system and general storage on another etc.  It's not rocket science.

As per other discussions elsewhere shared services may well provide the financial method to allow for the necessary economies of scale that lets schools have access to top of the range server infrastructure.

I doubt we will ever get to the stage of this beauty based on SLC (better than MLC) NAND technology but you never know:

http://www.ramsan.com/products/73

Anyone want to get a quote ...

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 617 9968
Fax 03 443 9900

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

[hemebond]

I know a school that had KAMAR running on a virtual server and they
could get to technical help from KAMAR until they put it onto a
physical box. According to KAMAR, running the KAMAR SMS on a virtual
server is completely unsupported.

[Patrick]

That would seem to be an unsatisfactory state of affairs for any
software vendor.

There are very few software packages that can not be virtualised
(except for another virtualisation environment). The fact it is
running on such an environment is likely to be transparent to the
software itself so I would take a strong view with any vendor that
pulls a swifty like that. I would suggest their package may not be
suited for the task it is being put to if it is overly dependent on a
physical environment because every virtualisation vendor has gone to
great lengths to make their platforms suitable for a wide variety of
applications.

Such are the advantages of it and the rapid uptake of virtualisation
today. In our site we went from no virtualisation plans at all to
having everything virtualised within the space of about 18 months. We
will need to spend bigger bucks shortly to get one of the hosts up to
spec so that the terminal server VM will have enough RAM available,
but it will be such a smooth process with virtualisation that it can
be done in a couple of days rather than a week.

[Alan at Wadestown School]

>
> Such are the advantages of it and the rapid uptake of virtualisation
> today. In our site we went from no virtualisation plans at all to
> having everything virtualised within the space of about 18 months.

With that statement you have put yourself forward for the position of
'advocate for virtualisation'. Accordingly, for the uninitiated, could
I ask you to please post to this topic a few 'classic' examples of
where schools could best take advantage of virtualisation technology.

thanks, Alan

[Peter Lambrechtsen]

With ESXi being a "Free" product I recommend that all services "could" be virtualised.  All you should need is sufficient 64Bit hardware able to run ESXi.  I personally have a test-bed server which is a HP/Compaq SFF 6005 with 8GB of Ram and 2x1TB SATA disks.  It happily runs approximately 12 VM's concurrently.  Granted this is for a non-production test environment but it does the business for our team of 6 developers (I don't work for a school).

File, Print, Internet Proxy/Filter, LMS, SMS, Terminal Services.

It's also perfect for LAB environments separated from the school network using VLANs where you want to have students build their own machines and be able to break them and restore from snapshots with ease.

I have yet to see a product or service work just as well in a virtual environment as they do on a physical server.

You can purchase the 2 or 4 node ESX option which gives you VCenter and the High Availaibility options for less than 4K US List Price.  I am not sure of the education deals that go with it, but it's not an excessive cost for the product considering what you get with it.

Combined with using tools such as Veeam FastSCP to copy Virtual Machines between host machines and for backup purposes the lifecycle management of a VM over a physical server is vastly simplified.

But that's just my view as a developer / infrastructure person.

Cheers

Peter

[Jeffrey Burke]

Not that the question was aimed at me but I'll put foward a few points. First up is better utilisation of infrastructure being able to host many individual servers on one better spec box with higher redundancy. Better licensing usage by being able to use a single copy of Windows Server Enterprise in four virtual instances to host seporate things with no additional cost. Ease of testing, deployment and migration. With a VM for the most part you can snapshot it then do upgrades or whatever and simply and quickly roll back if needed. Moving to new hardware becomes as easy as moving a couple of files and with centralised storage you can fail over VMs from one host to the other if a host server goes down.

Some stuff you can't really put on a VM, stuff that deals heavily with local hardware or high resolution time but hardly anything that most schools use would fit this criteria. There was a large disparity in disk performance when virtualising that excluded some DB stuff and terminal services but virtualisation has moved on and now you can.

I would be supprised if the above program had any major issues being virtualised as long as the host it is run on is up to it. Perhaps it has insane DB IO in which case this is something the devs should look into. If something as DB heavy as exchange can run fine on a VM then a library package should, barring any bizzarness run fine.

Any installation where there are a number of servers or where roals need to be split between server installs should really be heavilly considering virtualisation if they are not using it already.

Its also free which helps, there is a free version of Hyper-v which does clustering, VMWare has the cut down ESXi and Xen also has a free version. All of these platforms are viable solutions that could be considered. It can be easy to, Hyper-V is just a role on a 2008 server and its about four mouse clicks or a single commandline to make it a virtualisation host.

With decent spec servers you can stuff many old servers worth of work onto a single new server saving you power, space and AC costs but leaving you control over your system and the speed that having it locally affords.

We have been using virtualisation for years (3-4 in various forms) and it does make things easier and more efficient especially testing.

Sent from my Windows Mobile phone

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan at Wadestown School <alanja...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, 28 April 2011 9:06 a.m.
To: Techies for schools <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [techies-for-schools] Re: Does KAMAR run well on a virtual server?

>
> Such are the advantages of it and the rapid uptake of virtualisation
> today. In our site we went from no virtualisation plans at all to
> having everything virtualised within the space of about 18 months.

With that statement you have put yourself forward for the position of
'advocate for virtualisation'. Accordingly, for the uninitiated, could
I ask you to please post to this topic a few 'classic' examples of
where schools could best take advantage of virtualisation technology.

thanks, Alan

[Kent Lendrum]

Hi all,

I have not been a member of this mailing list, and hence haven't been part of the discussions on this topic - however Paul has bought to my attention some recent postings regarding KAMAR on Virtual Servers and has added me to the list.

I've had a quick read through the history of this topic, starting with Pauls forwarding of my original reply to his query. Thanks to those who have responded regarding their own experience.

> On Apr 16, 11:57 am, hemebond <hemeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I know a school that had KAMAR running on a virtual server and they
>> could get to technical help from KAMAR until they put it onto a
>> physical box. According to KAMAR, running the KAMAR SMS on a virtual
>> server is completely unsupported.

I would like to know who told you this, as it's not true from my perspective. We certainly don't refuse to support a client school for any reason, definitely not just because they are hosting on a virtual server !

In addition, we have numerious schools using Virtual Servers with no issues (as some have responded to earlier) and we support them exactly the same as any other school.

In fact - internally our main development server is running on a ESXi virtual server and has been for the last 3 years with the only down time due to planned system maintenance. I certainly wouldn't be willing to do this if it was a 'completely unsupported' environment as you have said.

regards

Kent Lendrum
KAMAR Limited
Mount Maunganui

[Kent Lendrum]

Patrick,

> There are very few software packages that can not be virtualised

As far as we are aware, there are no software issues with hosting KAMAR / FileMaker Server on a Virtual Server

> The fact it is running on such an environment is likely to be
> transparent to the software itself

I totally agree. KAMAR / FileMaker Server has absolutely no idea it's running on a Virtual Server.

However, being a Network Database Application - it does use RAM, read / write to disk, and send / receive data over the network. There's no interface

If FileMaker Server requests something from disk, the time it takes the OS to complete this task impacts on the overall performance. It's multi-threaded, so it'll get on doing something else on another thread in the mean time - but the client whose waiting for that request has to wait.

On a dedicated machine - the only I/O requests are the OS or FileMaker Server - so the response time is going to be better.

On a Virtual Server - the VM Host manages access to I/O - if another virtual server on the same host is heavily using the same services, performance will suffer. People perceive this as KAMAR being slow, but the reality is it's having to wait in line for it's turn to the shared resource.

I've been using/ experimenting with virtual environments since at least 2006. Despite the claims, what's happening within other VM's on the same host do impact on performance.

> Such are the advantages of it and the rapid uptake of virtualisation
> today. In our site we went from no virtualisation plans at all to

> having everything virtualised within the space of about 18 months. We
> will need to spend bigger bucks shortly to get one of the hosts up to
> spec so that the terminal server VM will have enough RAM available,
> but it will be such a smooth process with virtualisation that it can
> be done in a couple of days rather than a week.

I'm glad you said this.

Virtualisation is great. I have one grunty server hosting 6 virtual servers. It takes up 20% of the space of 6 separate servers, less power and less heat. But, it did cost me 5-6 times as much as the cost of the stand alone, dedicated server I also have. I still needed as much RAM and Disk Space as 6 separate server, and I included a decent Raid 5, SAS 15000RPM. Dual network cards, etc.

Virtualisation will save you money in running costs, but should not be looked as a way to save money setting up initially - if anything, to get it right may cost you more - but the running (and future upgrades) will be where the benefits are reaped.

[Kent Lendrum]

Jeffery,

> I would be supprised if the above program had any major issues being virtualised as long as the host it is run on is up to it. Perhaps it has insane DB IO in which case this is something the devs should look into. If something as DB heavy as exchange can run fine on a VM then a library package should, barring any bizzarness run fine.

Schools are unique, and place huge demands on resources that no business ever has to deal with.

I once dealt with a teacher who would bring her class of 30 students into the computer room, made them sit until everyone was ready - then had all 30 log on at once. Then complained why it took 5+ minutes for the logon to complete.
Once I convinced the teacher to allow the students to log on as they came in, the logon issues went away.

In the case of KAMAR, we deal with similar issues. Take for example a school which runs Tutor Time for 15 minutes each morning - in this short time frame they have 100 teachers all marking their attendance in the first few minutes. That's a huge number of unique queries with sorts, followed by 30 student record editing / creation per teacher (and associated logging we have to do) all in a very short time frame that we have to deal with.

[Jeffrey Burke]

I do work in schools and so am aware of the demands in place. I did try to point out that it should run fine on the right hardware in my original email and that with the right infrastructure it should work fine in a VM. You have confirmed that indeed should run fine in a VM.

Having never directly used your software I have no idea how it performs I was just giving additional information to the poster on virtualisation and applying general information about virtualisation and performance regarding other apps to the original topic. I had heard of your software but only remembered it was something to do with schools and thought it was a library package as opposed to a SMS. Same infrastructure though, with a DB and a client layer just with a more intensive IO load on it so my previous thoughts that it should work fine short of something really weird still apply.

Sent from my Windows Mobile phone

-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Lendrum <ke...@kamar.co.nz>
Sent: Thursday, 28 April 2011 1:02 p.m.
To: techies-f...@googlegroups.com <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [techies-for-schools] Re: Does KAMAR run well on a virtual server?

[Patrick]

Basically we can have one or two physical servers instead of a whole
pile of them. There is less physical hardware to purchase and
maintain, although they will have to be much bigger servers (CPU, RAM,
Disk).

There are also savings on space used, and on power, with therefore a
reduction in the cost of the site facilities needed to host the
server(s).

Each server is stored in a collection of files, some of which are
virtual hard disk files. If you need to move the virtual server onto
another physical host, it is largely and simply a matter of copying
those files. The use of virtual hard disk files frees me from having
to create disk partitions to manage disk space effectively.

The virtualisation is not just limited to servers. As a technician I
have my own small physical server which is set up as a virtual host.
Apart from a couple of virtual servers, it also runs virtual instances
of desktop operating systems. For example there are still a few
instances where I need to access a computer running Windows XP. I have
access to a Hyper-V virtual machine with XP running on it for this
sort of thing, rather than a physical computer cluttering up the space
under my desk.

These days even the hard disk of your desktop computer can be
virtualised. Windows 7 will boot to your desktop from a VHD file on
the hard disk. We are now using this technology to image all of our
laptops and desktops. To reload the image on a computer all you need
to do is a simple copy of the VHD file. It doesn't require any special
imaging software to do this.


On Apr 28, 9:08 am, Alan at Wadestown School <alanjamesp...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Patrick]

I'm not taking potshots at you in particular, just saying it's hard to
imagine any of the SMSs in NZ are going to be worse off in a
virtualisation environment.

[Patrick]

We have had four physical servers. As the old ones came down to life
expired then we went down to 3, one of the old ones got rebuilt to do
this. The next oldest is soon to get rebuilt to a much higher spec so
that it can run nearly everything, and then it will be effectively one
big physical server and "two halves" that will get combined into one
when they wear out.

On Apr 28, 12:48 pm, Kent Lendrum <k...@kamar.co.nz> wrote:
> Patrick,
>
> > There are very few software packages that can not be virtualised
>
> As far as we are aware, there are no software issues with hosting KAMAR / FileMaker Server on a Virtual Server

I just thought of an exception and that is anything that runs on Mac
Server - except if it is physically hosted on a Mac box.

> > Such are the advantages of it and the rapid uptake of virtualisation
> > today. In our site we went from no virtualisation plans at all to
> > having everything virtualised within the space of about 18 months. We
> > will need to spend bigger bucks shortly to get one of the hosts up to
> > spec so that the terminal server VM will have enough RAM available,
> > but it will be such a smooth process with virtualisation that it can
> > be done in a couple of days rather than a week.
>
> I'm glad you said this.
>
> Virtualisation is great.   I have one grunty server hosting 6 virtual servers.  It takes up 20% of the space of 6 separate servers, less power and less heat.   But, it did cost me 5-6 times as much as the cost of the stand alone, dedicated server I also have.  I still needed as much RAM and Disk Space as 6 separate server,  and I included a decent Raid 5, SAS 15000RPM. Dual network cards, etc.
>
> Virtualisation will save you money in running costs,  but should not be looked as a way to save money setting up initially - if anything, to get it right may cost you more - but the running (and future upgrades) will be where the benefits are reaped.

The biggest thing I like about it is I can set up a new virtual
machine with a few clicks without needing to find a new physical box
to put it onto. My desktop runs 64 bit Windows 7. There are still a
few things that we might need XP for, or 32 bit Windows 7. I can do
those tasks in virtual machines using RDP. When we tested the beta
edition of 7 we ran it all on virtual machines.

My desktop is set up to dual boot two different instances of Windows 7
both of which are VHDs. No messing around with disk partitions or
imaging. Just copied the VHDs across.