In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Matt Herlihy writes:
>I'm considering moving to the HP 9000/800 platform for our
>AFS servers. We currently use 8 HP 9000/7xx's that serve about
>30G of AFS file space. I would like to consolidate to possibly
>2 800 series servers and 2 750's. I'm looking for recommendations
>from people who currently use the 800's. The questions I have
>are:
>
>How well do they function as AFS servers?
>How much disk space can one accomodate?
>Do you use single ended or fast wide SCSI?
>What types of disks do you use?
>Do you have specific model numbers for the servers and disks?
>Is there a better way to go? Sun Sparc5 or Sparc20 for instance?
In a previous job, I ran AFS in a purely Sun environment, but now
I run it in an almost exclusively HP environment. Our primary cell
consists of 2 HP 9000/800 servers and one 700 machine. All the
800's vice partitions are on 2 GB FW disks (HP disks) - not using
LVM. We have seen several problems with AFS on HPs, and that coupled
with some other issues (internal and with Transarc) we have decided that
we can not support AFS in the long term. We are in the process of
migrating off of AFS due to these problems. The 2 initial problems
that we noticed in regards to AFS on the HPs were:
1) Periodically the AFS fileserver process gets hung
in kernel (waitinf for an inode that exists). The only
recourse is to kill as many processes as possible, umount
as many disks as possible, sync the disks, then power down
the machine. A standard shutdown will not work since HP-UX waits
for all the processes to die first. HP suggested a series
of patches that seem to have helped, but not eliminated
the problem. I firmly believe that this is a problem
with HP-UX, and not AFS, but the AFS fileserver is the only
thing I have found that enounters it.
2) I can't completely blame Transarc for this since they
didn't suggest we try this. We had an application which
needed a _VERY_ large AFS cache. We wanted to make it
4GB, but tried initially 1GB. Whenever we would try to
write a file in the AFS namespace, the machine would panic.
There have been a couple of other minor problems with AFS on the HPs, but
they haven't been quite a sever. For instance, in the GA 3.3a release
(there is a fix for this...you need to ask for it), if the RW copy of
root.afs is on a file server that is unavailable, but a quorum still
exists, and a relicate of root.afs is available, the entire namespace is
not available. I have only seen this on the 700s.. I don't know if it
affects the 800s also.
If you are dedicated to HP, the 800s are nice boxes, but be prepared
for some potential strangeness. _I_ feel much more confortable with
AFS on other platforms.
-matthew
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
America Online, Inc.
