[Deploying Sakai] Using VMs

[Martin B. Smith]

I'd love to see some pages in the Sakai confluence about virtualizing
Sakai. It sounds like Universidad de La Punta has a lot of good
information to share. At UF, we're deploying Sakai as a cluster of
virtual machines, and have some experiences already that we contribute
to such a documentation page in confluence.

Cheers,
-- 
Martin B. Smith
smithmb at ufl.edu - (352) 273-1374
CNS/Open Systems Group
University of Florida




On 01/25/2010 11:36 AM, Dario P wrote:
> We are working on a virtualized environment on Universidad de La Punta. We 
> did not hit yet a peak of use, but regarding install & setup, we have no met 
> a special situation.
> 
> We found that linux VMs guest on linux host with vmware server (free/trial 
> product) works pourly regarding the file system (double caching, high cpu 
> usage on host on guest file system pressure, etc) out-of-the-box, some 
> tuning is required, and full performance can be met only on ESX. We did not 
> put much effort, i't just the testing and "http load balancing sandbox" 
> environment" so we can't comment more. Just found some tips on blogs and 
> vmware forums. vmware does not use direct_io on linux, but ESX does.
> 
> Example: 4-5 min to startup tomcat (fully loaded sakai) vs 10 min on same 
> host on vmware. That's vmware.
> 
> ESX "just works". No problems so far.
> 
> very small testing setup
> - hp 115 ml, 4 gbytes vmware host
> - vmware guest, 2 gbytes
> 
> I have to dig in for prod env... Basically, so far:
> - apache load balancer
> - very small  "node starter" scripts. (what's everybody else using? Just a 
> node = server?)
> - 6 tomcat "nodes" (3 different installs, 2 nodes per install, each node can 
> start on any server)
> - 2 vm linux (mounts nodes by nfs, mount repository by nfs too)
> - NFS resources temporaly on another vm. Soon to be moved to storage.
> - vm linux with Oracle db 10.2
> 
> things to (never) do:
> - change hosts file resolution to internal dns.
> - implement curl to script apache balancer manager:
> 
> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> 
> 
> The ops team at Georgia Tech is continuing to add more VM capabilities to 
> our hosting setup and are now asking about running Sakai on a VM setup.
> Are there institutions out there that are using virtual machines in either a 
> test environment or production? What kind of issues should we be aware of? 
> How has your experience been with Sakai + VMs?