Veritas-HA subscribers, SUMMARY: An informal poll asked who has deployed a new install of VCS (not an upgrade) in the last year. To the many people who replied: Thanks! There are no real quantitative results, but some good insights into why people use VCS:
> We continue to use VCS as a defacto standard because of its maturity, > features and wide-spread admin knowledge within the company. > We never considered a hardware load balancing solution for any of the > re-architecting or initiatives. VCS (and related products) provides us > with a reasonably integrated platform where Windows and Unix admins can > help each other with a variety of system and service management tasks; > substituting a HW load balancer appears to us as a personnel-expensive > step. > We have experience of running two other VCS clusters, which was an > important consideration when choosing from various HA technologies. > We chose to stick w/ a tried and true technology. Most people appear to be using VCS to support one or more Oracle instances. Oracle support has always been a primary market for VCS, and this appears unchanged. VCS is a good tool for this job, as a couple people noted: > In most cases we use VCS for Database servers and for application servers > we use load balancers. So both solutions are useful for us. > Hardware load balancers do not replace Cluster Ware like VCS. Maybe only > in some sort of application or web sense (that's where a load balancer > should've been used to begin with). Several people said they are using VCS with GCO for clustering between geographically separate sites or for remote business continuity sites. No one said they are implemented VCS Traffic Director in the last year. One person commented on the veritas-ha list being quiet recently: > Maybe some of the weak traffic has been due to a down economy and less > money being spent; more technical issues come as your cluster nodes are > increasing or you are creating new clusters, not so much if you just let > a working cluster just sit and run (which VCS is good at). Plus, there > hasn't been a major VCS upgrade in a while, just the 5.0->5.1 that came > recently. In comparison to the veritas-bu (NetBackup) list, where a fair percentage of the traffic deals with version upgrade issues, the lack on traffic on the veritas-ha list could be seen as a good thing. -Scott -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Veritas-ha] An informal poll - Deployed VCS in the last 12 months? Date: Sun, 04 Apr 2010 09:48:46 -0600 Veritas-HA subscribers, I noticed traffic on the Veritas-ha maillist has dropped to just about zero this year. Makes me wonder if anyone out there is still deploying VCS on a regular basis, or has everyone moved to hardware load balancers? If you have deployed in new install of VCS (not an upgrade) in the last year, please let me know. Was there a specific reason that VCS was used, rather than a hardware load balancer? Are there installations where VCS is a more appropriate solution than a hardware load balancer? You can reply to the list, or to me directly. I'll tally the results and post a summary in a week or two. I'll keep everyone's inputs anonymous in the summary. Input from Symantec employees is welcome too. Also, has anyone deployed VCS Traffic Director recently? http://eval.veritas.com/downloads/pro/vcs/vcs_td_datasheet_0802.pdf -Scott _______________________________________________ Veritas-ha maillist - Veritas-ha@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-ha
