Comments on projects I'm working on. All postings are my personal opinion only.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Are you running Domino on VMWARE ?
We have been doing it for an age, and one of our customers is about to roll it out to over 400 sites. Are you running Domino on VMWARE ? If so what version (ESX, ESXi, Server) and how have you found it ?
10 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Two Domino 8.0.2 servers on a single VMWare Server 2.0 installation. Runs nice. However, VMWare Server 2 admin via the default web interface is a bit cumbersome, so I recommend to install the VMWare Infrastructure Client, which gives you more direct access to the images (more like VMWare Workstation).
We are running all of our Domino servers on VMware ESX 3.5. We have 6 Domino servers, 3 on Windows and 3 on Linux (2 of them partitioned on the same Linux VM), in two different networks. No problem whatsoever, but we don't have many users so I can't judge performance.
We have 2 Domino 8.0.2 servers running on a VMWare Server. One is a mail server and the other is a Sametime server. We sometimes run into situations where Disk I/O is maxed out but that is because we are guilty of having too many other VM's running on the same box. With VMWare it is sometimes too easy to say...."Sure, just add that server to the VM box"
Our BES runs on ESX 3.5 and we have our test server running on the same ESX. And we have two branch offices ( France and Bulgaria ) where we installed an ESXi that hosts a Domino server and a Novell file server. Everythings works just fine.
If you can, use ESXi or ESX. Much cleaner than a software hypervisor (i.e. vmware server).
We run all 18 of our dev, prod, ST, Quickr and BES servers on two large VMware hosts. Each has a lot of RAM (>32GB) and a lot of CPU (2x Quad Core Xeons).
Some people shy away from mail server virtualization due to I/O fears, but provided you have enough spindles in the SAN or server you will be fine. If you can stay away from RAID5 and go RAID10 (yes, I know the disk cost, but the write speed disadvantges of RAID5 can hurt VMs) you will be a lot happier.
With the VMware foundation server license you get ESX for 2 sockets, VCB and Virtual Update Agent, that is the way I would go unless you need HA or VMotion.
We use it for test servers, giving us lots of flexibility in putting together a variety of QA environments for our product. Until recently we've been using VMWare Server, but I recently started experimenting with ESXi.
I have found that utility servers and any server with a light load is OK, your real problem is i/o performance on heavily used servers. I don't think that the sans you attach to the server alone will alleviate such problems as VMWare has a maximum i/o per ESX host that it can process. Raid10, as somebody had suggested previously, can help but you are really looking at the capability of the host to deal with the combined i/o requests of all VMWare sessions on that box at the same time.
I recently sat through a presentation by VMWare for the US Army where they were introducing the upcoming changes that they are building into Version 4 of VMWare. Next to the many improvemnts and add-ons for an enterprise they claim that the i/o performance of an ESX host will be DOUBLED (!!!). Now I think we are really getting to the point where you will probably be able to host havily used Domino servers along with other VMW sessions on the same ESX host (with the proper i/o architectre of course) and I am really excited.
I have used VMWare for years and love it, now with V4 coming I really think it will make an even larger impact than it has up until now.
I'm running 1 Sametime instance in production on a VMW ESX 3.5 server, and it's a champ... I have the VM set with the bare minimum for specs and no issues what so ever. I also have a dev server set, but I only pop that fella on when I need to play, but even that works great.
Title: How to size Domino and Sametime systems for full production loads on VMware ESX Server Doc #: 1267837 URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21267837
Title: Troubleshooting performance issues for a Domino server on VMware ESX Doc #: 1297386 URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21297386
IBM® Lotus® Sametime® Reference Architecture in a VMware® Infrastructure 3 Environment http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/ibm_lotus_sametime_ref_arch_vi3_wp.pdf
Sametime presentation given @ VMWorld 2007 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dpiblog.nsf/dx/22C7B35B3E7E3AB685257364000D98E6/$FILE/PS_WV21_287981_166-1_FIN_v2.pdf
10 comments:
Two Domino 8.0.2 servers on a single VMWare Server 2.0 installation. Runs nice. However, VMWare Server 2 admin via the default web interface is a bit cumbersome, so I recommend to install the VMWare Infrastructure Client, which gives you more direct access to the images (more like VMWare Workstation).
We are running all of our Domino servers on VMware ESX 3.5. We have 6 Domino servers, 3 on Windows and 3 on Linux (2 of them partitioned on the same Linux VM), in two different networks.
No problem whatsoever, but we don't have many users so I can't judge performance.
We have 2 Domino 8.0.2 servers running on a VMWare Server. One is a mail server and the other is a Sametime server. We sometimes run into situations where Disk I/O is maxed out but that is because we are guilty of having too many other VM's running on the same box. With VMWare it is sometimes too easy to say...."Sure, just add that server to the VM box"
Our BES runs on ESX 3.5 and we have our test server running on the same ESX. And we have two branch offices ( France and Bulgaria ) where we installed an ESXi that hosts a Domino server and a Novell file server. Everythings works just fine.
If you can, use ESXi or ESX. Much cleaner than a software hypervisor (i.e. vmware server).
We run all 18 of our dev, prod, ST, Quickr and BES servers on two large VMware hosts. Each has a lot of RAM (>32GB) and a lot of CPU (2x Quad Core Xeons).
Some people shy away from mail server virtualization due to I/O fears, but provided you have enough spindles in the SAN or server you will be fine. If you can stay away from RAID5 and go RAID10 (yes, I know the disk cost, but the write speed disadvantges of RAID5 can hurt VMs) you will be a lot happier.
With the VMware foundation server license you get ESX for 2 sockets, VCB and Virtual Update Agent, that is the way I would go unless you need HA or VMotion.
We use it for test servers, giving us lots of flexibility in putting together a variety of QA environments for our product. Until recently we've been using VMWare Server, but I recently started experimenting with ESXi.
Love VMware hence my session at Lotusphere. Be aware though, only VMWare ESX is supported.
I have found that utility servers and any server with a light load is OK, your real problem is i/o performance on heavily used servers.
I don't think that the sans you attach to the server alone will alleviate such problems as VMWare has a maximum i/o per ESX host that it can process. Raid10, as somebody had suggested previously, can help but you are really looking at the capability of the host to deal with the combined i/o requests of all VMWare sessions on that box at the same time.
I recently sat through a presentation by VMWare for the US Army where they were introducing the upcoming changes that they are building into Version 4 of VMWare. Next to the many improvemnts and add-ons for an enterprise they claim that the i/o performance of an ESX host will be DOUBLED (!!!). Now I think we are really getting to the point where you will probably be able to host havily used Domino servers along with other VMW sessions on the same ESX host (with the proper i/o architectre of course) and I am really excited.
I have used VMWare for years and love it, now with V4 coming I really think it will make an even larger impact than it has up until now.
I'm running 1 Sametime instance in production on a VMW ESX 3.5 server, and it's a champ... I have the VM set with the bare minimum for specs and no issues what so ever. I also have a dev server set, but I only pop that fella on when I need to play, but even that works great.
Doc to review:
Lotus Software Knowledge Base Document
Title: How to size Domino and Sametime systems for full production loads on VMware ESX Server
Doc #: 1267837
URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21267837
Title: Troubleshooting performance issues for a Domino server on VMware ESX
Doc #: 1297386
URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21297386
IBM® Lotus® Sametime® Reference Architecture in a VMware® Infrastructure 3 Environment
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/ibm_lotus_sametime_ref_arch_vi3_wp.pdf
Sametime presentation given @ VMWorld 2007
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dpiblog.nsf/dx/22C7B35B3E7E3AB685257364000D98E6/$FILE/PS_WV21_287981_166-1_FIN_v2.pdf
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