- This topic has 14 replies, 11 voices, and was last updated 14 years, 8 months ago by
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I am doing some research on customers running Cloverleaf in virtualized operating environments like VMWare. I am interested in: – are you using or thinking about using a virtualization software to run CL within?
– and how does it (or how would it) make your life easier – what is the compelling value to do so?
And if you are – more detailed questions:
– What brand and OS flavor of virtualization software are you running?
– What base platform/server are you running the virtualization environment on?
– What is the resource configuration of the virtualization CL environment? IE. RAM, how many processors, file systems, etc.
thanks
-rey
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Rey:
Are you only interested in VMware virtualization?
For many years, we have been using a static virtualized environment on our IBM RS6000 boxes that are typically referred to as LPARs and they are wonderful.
One thing about VMware that pops into my memory from when a group from IBM was doing a presentation about dynamic virtualization to us a few years ago, they told us it would not support the SNA protocol.
I would like to know if in your quest for knowledge you discover this to be true or false because the SNA protocol is a show stopper for us.
Our server team has been pushing anyone that can, be moved to a dynamically virtualized environment like VMware.
When our server group’s manager first talked to me, he was offerring to allocate one-tenth of a CPU for my cloverleaf application, which for me was a scary thought.
We currently use an average of 4 CPUs for each cloverleaf LPAR and seem to keep them rather busy.
I called cloverleaf techinical support at that time and was told that cloverleaf would run on VMware but it was a grey area as to how much support I could expect.
Plus I was aslo told that to have support there was a 2 CPU minimum requirement for cloverleaf.
That was several years ago and perhaps you can let us know if either of these are still true.
In other words a heavy usage cloverleaf shop like ours can only share a physical box so much before they starve other applications for resouces and that is one reason I like the static virtualization we have with our LPARs.
It might be that VMware is capable of statically virtualizing a machine and if that is ture please reply letting me know that, too.
Anyway that is some food for thought to add to your plate and I’m sure there will be more to come from others because virtualization is a popular concept and topic of discussion around here these days.
Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com -
Rey, we are using IBM’s virtualization solution.
Quote:– and how does it (or how would it) make your life easier – what is the compelling value to do so?
– we are able to move a running Cloverleaf system to another system and do maintenance or whatever and don’t have to shutdown the Cloverleaf application. Which means we can do more maintenance during daytime, instead of the middle of the night. 😀 Also, able to use the rest of system hardware resources for another LPAR to run another application.
We are running on IBM P6-520 with 2-core 4.2GHZ processors and 16GB of memory. Running AIX 5.3-08 version OS. For the virtual portion, we are using IBM’s PowerVM. It is awesome. We only have .9 of a CPU and 5GB of memory allocated to the LPAR we use for both our Prod and Test Cloverleaf 5.5PRev1 version. It runs like a scalded dog. We are able to “move” a fully running Cloverleaf LPAR to our standby system and the users/interfaces never even know that it is on a different system.
Russ, not sure about the SNA stuff. We finally got rid of all our SNA interfaces last year. But you might want to check with IBM.
I really really like our current LPAR/PowerVM setup. 8)
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Sam: We are running on IBM P570s but I had heard from our system admins that the new P6 series they are pushing for had transparent fail-over and the application doesn’t even have to be shutdown to fail-over to another LPAR.
I’m excited to hear what you describe because it sounds like you are confirming the magic they have been enticing me with.
Does your cloverleaf application have a light load because how do you explain that it can get by with a mere nine tenths of a CPU.
Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com -
Good Morning,
We currently have 3 Cloverleaf Environments (Development, Testing and Productions). All three run in their own virtual environment on a Windows 2008 Hyper-V Server.
There are a few reasons we decided to do this. The most compelling reason for us was the ability to backup the VM Hard Drive for a quick recovery was the most compelling reason. A close second was consolidation of resources.
We based the Resource Allocation on the needs of the environment. Each Virtual Machine was built using a 18 Gig Virtual Drive. All environments were built with Windows Server 2003 Standard w/sp2. Development has 512MB Ram and 1 Virtual Processor allocated to it. Test has 2GB Ram and 2 Virtual Processors allocated to it. Production has 3GB Ram and 4 Processors allocated to it.
We also use the CSC to connect to all of our HL7 Customers. As traffic increases we have also considered isolating production traffic onto it’s own NIC.
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Russ, I believe what Sam is referring to is called Live Partition Mobility, and is a feature available with the newer P6 hardware. It is not the same thing as “failover”, though, in the traditional sense. That is a function of High Availability(HACMP, in IBM’s world, also called PowerHA). Here is a quote from an IBM RedBook on LPM:
Quote:High availability environments also require the definition of automated procedures that detect software and hardware events and activate recovery plans to restart a failed service as soon as possible.
Live Partition Mobility increases global availability, but it is not a high availability solution. It requires both source and destination systems be operational and that the partition is not in a failed state. In addition, it does not monitor operating system and application state and it is, by default, a user-initiated action.
Unplanned outages still require specific actions that are normally executed by cluster solutions such as IBM PowerHA.
IBM PowerHA for AIX, also known as High Availability Cluster Multiprocessing (HACMP
Tim Pancost
Trinity Health -
* Are you using or thinking about using a virtualization software to run CL within?
We are using VMWare + RedHat Linux + Cloverleaf 5.6
* How does it (or how would it) make your life easier – what is the compelling value to do so?
It lowers the cost (both OS and hardware) dramatically and makes better use of server resources. The VM infratstucture provides disaster recovery and fault tolerance. The ability to create snapshots of the VM’s provides a good way to stage changes such as OS upgrades, Cloverleaf upgrades, and large changes to sites with a fast way to roll back when things go bad. Redhat provides many powerful tools for developers such as the GNU library. Redhat makes installing new tools very easy to do.
* What brand and OS flavor of virtualization software are you running? What base platform/server are you running the virtualization environment on?
IBM 3650, VMWare ESX x3.5 Update 2, RedHat 5.0 Enterprise.
* What is the resource configuration of the virtualization CL environment? IE. RAM, how many processors, file systems, etc.
2 CPU’s, 3GB of RAM, 20GB disk space, and Samba mounts to network shares.
-- Max Drown (Infor)
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I’ve been asking if Cloverleaf has to run on AIX if doing SNA and the answer I continue to get is – yes. If anyone has heard otherwise or is doing cloverleaf/SNA interface(s) on another operating system besides AIX, I would like to hear about it, especially if it has been done on Redhat Linux.
Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com -
Only on AIX to my knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Systems_Network_Architecture -- Max Drown (Infor)
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Russ,
We are running AIX5.3 and had SNA style interfaces. We lobbied the application end (running a heavily modified Medipac application) to switch to PDL style TCP/IP connectivity. Our in-house IBM programmers (CICS: they were able to modify these programs to get off the SNA and on to TCP/IP).
Apparently it is not rocket science; however, they had to code for handling ACKs and only connect when they have something to send.
Sure made our lives easier on Cloverleaf now in managing their interfaces from the Cloverleaf side of the fence.
We stick with Aix though due to its robust recovery capabilities and stellar support. Yes, we pay a premium but have gotten our money’s worth for a very reliable platform as we contribute to the organization’s high regard for patient safety and care.
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