Re: [zones-discuss] V440/Zones Capacity
The only correct way to do capacity planning is to plot application throughput with system utilization. Maybe you can run 40 Zones each with a webserver, and a database Zone, or maybe 4. Or 1. It's completely workload dependent. The system utilization data, without corresponding throughput and response time values, are useless. I don't mean to sound smug, but a given systems capacity is determined by application-level delivered performance, not by whether mpstat(1) indicates the CPUs have 10% idle or run queue depth. An Oracle database workload alone could choke a SF440. Running webservers handling dynamic content with media, and handling 10k hits per hour is very different than simple static content and 500 hits a week. /jim Dan Price wrote: On Tue 13 Mar 2007 at 04:46PM, Morris Hooten - SLS Business Infrastructure wrote: Based on curent use cases and experienced users of containers how many sparse root zones could be run on a sunfire 440 wit h4x 1.3 ghz cpus and 16gb ram? i currently have 10 sparse zones with all running a webserver and a third running oracle. my average at the moment is: load average: 0.50, 0.41, 0.48 would I be risking it to add three additonal zones running webservers and oracle? thoughts? what should my load averages look like consistently? Load average is not a great metric, although that looks ok. Can you post some output of 'mpstat 5' (let it run for a bit and make sure you get a representative sample). Also, the output of the bottom portion of 'prstat -Z' may be helpful. -dp ___ zones-discuss mailing list zones-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [zones-discuss] V440/Zones Capacity
That's cool, and I certainly respect your expertise in this area (among many others when it comes to this stuff). The problem we run into (more often than not) is that these things are rarely linear. There's a knee in the curve lurking behind a dark corner that can trip things up before we're at the load point the utilization plot told us we'd get to. With workload tracking, we can see this coming, and plan accordingly. All that said, in reality it's a lost art (if it ever really existed), and sar(1) remains the defacto standard for capacity planning. DTrace comes to mind as a tool that can be leveraged for tracking things like response time and throughput for workloads that are not instrumented to do so. Would make an interesting exercise to write a DTrace script along the lines of Brendan's DTrace ToolKit that tracks httpd request/response times and hit counts Thanks, /jim Dan Price wrote: On Tue 13 Mar 2007 at 08:44PM, Jim Mauro wrote: The only correct way to do capacity planning is to plot application throughput with system utilization. Maybe you can run 40 Zones each with a webserver, and a database Zone, or maybe 4. Or 1. It's completely workload dependent. Yes, I agree that that would be optimal. Offline, Morris gave me some stats to look at, and it appears that the machine is about 2-5% busy, with about 30-40% of total system memory in use. If the machine is processing its normal workload at that utilization, that's a good starting point (in my mind) for things seem OK. -dp ___ zones-discuss mailing list zones-discuss@opensolaris.org