[Building Sakai] Sakai on VMware?

[Tony Stevenson]

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On 02/02/2011 04:14, Bryan Bakotich wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have been getting asked by our systems team to move our Sakai app server
> to a VM. Has anybody else has done this and is the performance good enough
> for production?
> 
> We are currently running only one app server on real hardware with a heap
> size of 6GB. We are using VMware vSphere 4, and the OS of the VM would be
> CentOS 5.
> 
> Any insight is much appreciated. The only info I found about this relating
> to Sakai was in this thread:
> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/production/2009-March/000021.html

Bryan,

We (University of Cambridge) run our production platform on a Xen
virtualisation platform.  We run several app nodes, httpd, ldap and MX
nodes all as virtual machines.  The only thing we do not virtualise is
MySQL and NFS.

This is partly a historical decision, but also partly due to the limited
disk I/O capabilities for a VM.  The way we have our SQL setup (binary
logging, slaving etc) we didnt want to take the risk of running this in
a VM.

That said, in vSphere you have the option to customise the disk I/O
bandwidth and so you should be able to negate this using that setting.

If you run all of your Sakai instance on a single physical server
currently, and you are not allowed, or are not comfortable making the
advanced changes to disk I/O then I'd suggest you split the machine as
it is now into 2/3 smaller VMs.

1) MySQL - on an ESX host with better disk I/O capabilities.
2) WebApp (tomcat et al)
3) LDAP/HTTPD/MX

You could very likely combine the latter two VMs too if you really
wanted to keep the number of VMs down.

> 
> -Bryan
> 
> 
> 
> 
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- -- 

Cheers,
Tony

- ------------------------
tony at pc-tony.com
pctony at apache.org
tony at caret.cam.ac.uk

http://blog.pc-tony.com

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