----- Reply message -----
From: Tripp, Donald (HAL)
Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2012 7:58 PM
To: HAL DistList: IS UNIX; Flach, Cynthia (HAL); Ruckman, Maurice (HAL); Guillaume Radde (guillaume.radde@redhat.com)
Subject: VMware status
I have tested the hot add cpu and memory function of VMware ESX5 on RHEL 5.8 ( what the prod cluster is running ), as well as RHEL 6, the latest version. For RHEL 5.8 the hot add cpu and memory caused no errors upon addition, however the OS does not recognize it. I had to manually enable the CPU and Memory, and afterwards the operating system recognized the addition, but any running processes or applications did not. In this scenario, if we added a CPU or memory to a running JBoss server, the server would not see any additional benefit unless it was restarted.
In RHEL 6, the story is a bit different. The CPU was immediately noticed by the operating system, but once again any running process or application did not see it until restarted. When attempting to add memory, the system failed.
I think it would be best to load test the JBoss environment prior to going live, and make any changes then. Any changes after going live will still require a restart.
----- Reply message -----
From: "Tripp, Donald (HAL)" <DTripp@HollandAmerica.com>
To: "Ruckman, Maurice (HAL)" <MRuckman@HollandAmerica.com>
Cc: "Augustine, Anila (HAL)" <AAugustine@HollandAmerica.com>, "Schumacher, Mike (HAL)" <MSchumacher@HollandAmerica.com>
Subject: Memory and config settings
Date: Fri, Mar 23, 2012 8:44 pm
The current configuration, which is has not been changed since there creation, is 2 CPUs and 4 gigs of ram for the jboss vms, and 2 CPUs and 3 gigs of ram for the web servers. As I mentioned, VMware 5 supports hot add resources, and I will be testing and verifying this over the weekend. I have made a few suggestions to Mike regarding resource allocation for the various environments. I feel it would be better to have extra memory available on the machines, and if the need arises we can add a second CPU. That way production it's negatively impacted if the servers are overwhelmed right from the start. Also, it time next week allows, i would like to schedule a time we can do the load testing we talked about today, so i can monitor both the vms and the VMware environment to see how it handles it. There is a very large difference between AIX and Linux, and between the P series IBM hardware and a virtualized x86 environment. I'm hoping to minimize the hardware impact on the production system. The nice aspect of this setup is if need be we can take offline once jboss server to modify it, and 3 are still operating and load balancing.
