New project: (quite) high traffic web sites on a vSphere cluster and FAS2020

[atinivelli]

Hi all,

i'm designing a new project to host a news web site, wiht usual LAMP architecture, running on a 3 ESXi hosts cluster on a 4.1.u1 vSphere infrestructure.

The storage (a dual head FAS 2020) will serve as NFS html files repository (controller 1) and controller 0 will serve the Datastores for the ESXi hosts.

My preferred solution would be to use only NFS for the Datastores instead of FCP. We have just a couple of MySQL db server with potential performance problems. I am oriented in avoiding high disk I/O using solutions like /tmpfs on RAM.

I'm aware of VSC (already installed on my vCenter server, configuration on ESXi hosts done) and about the importance of Guest alignment.

What do you think about my approach?

And, second question: at the moment the FAS2020 are at Data ONTAP Release 7.3.4P3. Would be convenient to upgrade to current ONTAP8 in my situation?

Thank you very much in advance.

Alessandro

[shaunjurr]

I think you better benchmark a single LAMP server with NFS storage for your web pages against your VMWare idea.

I get the feeling that you would have been better off saving the vmware licenses and getting a bigger filer.

Why would you want to run linux apache and mysql servers on VMWare?

[atinivelli]

shaunjurr ha scritto:
I think you better benchmark a single LAMP server with NFS storage for your web pages against your VMWare idea.
I get the feeling that you would have been better off saving the vmware licenses and getting a bigger filer.
Why would you want to run linux apache and mysql servers on VMWare?

in 2006 i designed a traditional linux cluster with 6 front end and mysql server. We cannot go with a single server because of high load and reliability/flexibility reasons

at the moment the infrastructure relies on many servers in a red hat cluster with virtualization. The machines are getting old, we already have a vmware infrastructure so it's natural to move them there.

Linux is supported OS on VMware

p.s. at the moment the load on the fas 2020 is around 50% and i hope it will decrease when mounted by  a few virtual machine instead of 20...

[thomas_glodde · Accepted solution]

Hi,

the architecture seems fine for me, not sure if a fas2020 is the right machine for it, especialy if you are low on disks in the system. You should definately stress test the system before going productive.

ONTAP 8 is NOT supported or even installeable on a FAS2020 because it has not enough RAM. So you have to stick with latest 7.3.X release.

Regards,

Thomas

[atinivelli]

thomas.glodde ha scritto:
Hi,
the architecture seems fine for me, not sure if a fas2020 is the right machine for it, especialy if you are low on disks in the system. You should definately stress test the system before going productive.
ONTAP 8 is NOT supported or even installeable on a FAS2020 because it has not enough RAM. So you have to stick with latest 7.3.X release.
Regards,
Thomas

thank you very much for your help.

about stress testing, the CPU1 of the 2020 is already serving the site (mounted by about 20 xen virtual machines, i will decrease this number using less VM with more resources) and it's average load in the peak day hours is around 50%.

The CPU0 is currently unused.

PS.: I also strongly hope to be allowed to use, in the future, RAM caching. Usually poor and lazy webmasters are enemies of this so i'll have to deal with

[shaunjurr]

Hi,

I never suggested that you use a single server.  I'm not sure where you got that idea.

Just because you can run linux on VMWare doesn't mean that it is always a good idea for everything. I can't really see how one can say that it is "natural" to migrate this into a VMWare environment.  Without some idea of how it is going to perform, there is no logical reason to do this at all except for not having to buy more equipment.

The age of your previous machines isn't really a factor so long as they work and their costs are not higher than new machines.

The NFS load, and the load in general, will probably increase now that you are adding a number of machines that have their OS's on the same storage in addition to cramming your mysql database over to vmware.

All I can say is good luck.  You are making for the most part, a wild guess that this migration will give you satisfactory results.

[atinivelli]

shaunjurr ha scritto:
Just because you can run linux on VMWare doesn't mean that it is always a good idea for everything. I can't really see how one can say that it is "natural" to migrate this into a VMWare environment.  Without some idea of how it is going to perform, there is no logical reason to do this at all except for not having to buy more equipment. 
The age of your previous machines isn't really a factor so long as they work and their costs are not higher than new machines.
The NFS load, and the load in general, will probably increase now that you are adding a number of machines that have their OS's on the same storage in addition to cramming your mysql database over to vmware.

age of previous machine is a matter because support is getting more expensive/difficult, and they are working not as fine because of an unwise virtualization program that introduced multiple single points of failure.

All had to be redesigned, already having a vSphere infrastructure (meaning blade enclosure with good network and room for new blade servers) i guessed it was best to migrate from Xen to vSphere. We could use Xen again? No, we are too few to deal with two different technologies.

Regarding the nfs load, there are two points: first of all the disk of the VMs will be served but the FAS CPU which is currently unused. Second: the Apache VMs won't have high I/O on disk, the MySQL servers will have, but we think to use tricks to reduce it like having /tmpfs (where temp tables are created) on ram. We have got host servers with redundant ram.

Giving more details, the problem of avoiding high load on the mysql server is old one, and most of the applications have been written to use static web pages (i.e. generating static new html files when content is updated instead that retrieving the content from the db everytime a visitor requests the page). It's a news web site using 60-80Mbit/s during day hours.