[OpenAFS] Re: recommended hardware for new production environment

[Andrew Deason]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:54:15 -0700
Jonathan Nilsson <jnilsson@uci.edu> wrote:

> Mainly, I am interested in finding out how much CPU and RAM the
> database server components of OpenAFS will take.  We have donated old
> hardware with Dual Intel Xeon 3.06GHz processors and 4GB DDR2 RAM.
> And we can also allocate a few Virtual Machines with up to 4GB memory.

Do you have an estimate on the number of client machines? How many
database servers?

Though even without that, I'm inclined to say that that is really really
overly sufficient (overkill) for database servers for a cell of that
size. Though that highly depends on usage, I'd imagine hitting
fileserver's bottlenecks way before dbservers'. Any reason you're
specifically asking about dbserver hardware specs, not fileserver specs?
At that scale, reliability tends to matter more than speed for database
servers.

If I recall correctly, the ACM@UIUC cell is similar in size (perhaps a
bit smaller) to what you describe. (A few hundred users, around 50 or 60
project volumes, storage I think is a TB or two. Nearly all web data for
them is served directly from AFS.) They are currently running dbservers
on VMs with 256M of RAM. The VM hosts only have between 512M and 1.5G of
RAM total, I think, and are PIIIs. I don't recall any problems with
them, but your client load may be quite a bit higher. Just a data point.

-- 
Andrew Deason
adeason@sinenomine.net