From: Dave T. (davidlt77@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Oct 15 2003 - 14:04:36 EDT
Thank you to everyone who responded. Following are the responses, in the
order I received them, to my question about hosting both a development and
production environment on the same VA7410, with my original posts at the
very bottom:
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Rick Starr" <rstarr@bellsouth.net>
To: "'Dave T.'" <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a
VA7410
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:24:27 -0400
David,
Although there is no technical reason not to do this, In my humble opinion
there are some things you may want to consider. Some of these consideration
depend in the current configuration but I'll just throw out a few ideas.
1) Your email does not mention whether these servers are direct connected or
connected via fabric switches or what OS versio(s) . In the case they are
connected via switches and both HP-UX and you have 4 FC controllers in the
VA, I would recommend allocating 2 FC controllers to your production env and
two for your dev env via switch zoning. This will accomplish two things. The
first is traffic will be segregated allowing dedicated bandwidth for each
env. Secondly, It is a bit more secure as you can present "Dev LUNS" down
two channels and "Prod LUNS" down the other two channels.
2) If you don't have Fabric switches and only have two FC controllers. The
use of Secure LUN manger will accomplish the same separation except you will
need to share bandwidth.
3) In a best practice scenario you should try not to mix different HBA
types, driver versions etc on the same Storage interface. Make sure that
both prod and dev servers are at the latest supported levels for FC
Interfaces (A6795A or A5158A) Being that the VA7410 utilizes a 2 GB
interface it would behoove you to use the 2 GB A6795A HBA in your HP hosts.
Also FC patches or patch levels are important. My point here is just beaware
Of what and how you are connecting.
4) If this is a Microsoft env. You will most certainly want to do zoning
and/or secure luns manager as the Microsoft OS has a nasty habit of trying
to write signatures to what ever luns it sees. If this is mixed with a HP-UX
env what happens is the MS signature overwrites the HP voume group
descriptor area.
Hope this helps.
Rick
********************************************************************************
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Abramson, Stuart" <SAbramson@Wabtec.com>
To: "'Dave T.'" <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a
VA7410
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:33:06 -0400
Pro:
1. You do what you have to do. Principal isn't enough to justify
spending money that you don't have.
Con:
1. The performance of the box should be tuned to the usage.
o The production disk should be raid-1, because it's faster.
o The development disk can be raid-5, which is slower, but is
more cost-effective.
o If that's the case, then you wouldn't want to put Production
on the slower box, and you are wasting disk space to put Dev on the
Producton disk.
2. Any activity on the Production box adds load. Adding development
space to the production disk could affect production performance.
3. Adding dev space on the production disk, reduces the growth
potential for the production box over time. (You have to measure/forecast
your growth.)
My experience has been that management will do what they need to do. If
they are saying let's use PROD disk space for DEV until next budget year,
and then we'll buy more space for DEV, then that will be fine.
Stuart
Stuart Abramson | Off: 412/825-1434 | Cell: 412/417-1567 | email:
sabramson@wabtec.com
********************************************************************************
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Schmidt, Claudiu {ISO~Grenzach}" <CLAUDIU.SCHMIDT@Roche.COM>
To: "Dave T." <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a
VA7410
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 16:31:21 +0200
Hi Dave,
We have 2 VA7410 in our environment, and had a lot of problems with
them.
On a VA you can not give certain aplications more performance then other
aplications, so everybody gets the same performance. What kind of raid
do you have configured on the VA? If you have autoraid, you have bad
performance, if you have raid 0/1 you have less space. At raid 0/1 ,you
shoud monitor tue free space! If freespace goes under 2 times
diskcapacity, then ,at diskfailure VA will automaticaly move data from
raid 0/1 to raid 5 to get more space, and this goes massive on the
performance.
VA is not the storage box where you shoud put critical data! We had 2
times complete data loss, and once, they had to exchange one VA
completely to get it working again.
Rgds,
Claudiu
********************************************************************************
----Original Message Follows----
From: Ben Le <ble@pcc.edu>
To: "Dave T." <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a
VA7410
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 08:34:19 -0700
Management wants management gets! You can create a special LUN on VA7410 for
development use only.
Ben
********************************************************************************
----Original Message Follows----
From: <tvmyers@eng.delcoelect.com>
To: davidlt77@hotmail.com (Dave T.)
Subject: Re: [HPADM] UPDATE: Melding Development & Production Environments
on a VA7410
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:34:32 -0500 (EST)
> The environment is as follows:
>
> 1. HP-UX 11i production N4000 server with VA7410 attached via fiber.
> 2. HP-UX 11.0 development N4000 server that management wants to connect
to
> the VA7410. In doing so, the development system would be connected via
its
> own two HBA cards.
My first question would be: Do you have the Secure Manager product?
That seems to be the only way to keep two servers from "touching" each
other's
LUNs. If they were both Production servers with all changes controlled by a
configuration management system, I wouldn't worry so much. However, a
development system tends not to use formal configuration change controls and
without careful review, you could accidently overwrite a production LUN from
the devlopment server. It's as simple as a typo in a pvcreate command.
Believe me, I know THAT one from painful experience.
Beyond that, I don't see why a va7410 couldn't easily supply the performance
demands of two N4000 servers. We couldn't saturate it's predecessor, a
va7400, with three A500/550 servers in a fully switched, dual-fabric
environment.
Cheers, tom
--
Tom Myers, Information Systems Engineer; Delphi Corporation,
IS&S - KAT Unix Admin, M/S CT200, P.O. Box 9005, Kokomo IN 46904-9005
E-Mail: tvmyers@eng.delcoelect.com Voice: 765-451-0918
********************************************************************************
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Daniel H. Brown" <brown@brauhausdc.org>
To: "Dave T." <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a
VA7410
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:16:27 -0400 (EDT)
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, Dave T. wrote:
> Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 09:58:42 -0400
> From: "Dave T." <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
> To: hpux-admin@DutchWorks.nl
> Subject: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a
VA7410
>
> We have a VA7410 in production, but now we need more disk space in
> development. Management wants to use space on the production VA to
> accommodate the development need. I don't know any good arguments not to
do
> this, but I'm not comfortable with it. What are your opinions?
Anything which adds "risk" to an environment will likely adversely affect
"uptime." Using a production system for development or test adds risk.
And,
The more uptime you want, the more resources you'll need to apply.
Resourses include cpu, disk, network, time, sysadmin, etc -- all of which
can be expressed as money.
--
Dan Brown
brown@brauhausdc.org
********************* ORIGINAL POSTS BELOW
**************************************
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Dave T." <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
To: hpux-admin@dutchworks.nl
Subject: [HPADM] UPDATE: Melding Development & Production Environments on a
VA7410
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:30:54 -0400
The environment is as follows:
1. HP-UX 11i production N4000 server with VA7410 attached via fiber.
2. HP-UX 11.0 development N4000 server that management wants to connect to
the VA7410. In doing so, the development system would be connected via its
own two HBA cards.
Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: hpux-admin-owner@DutchWorks.nl [mailto:hpux-admin-owner@DutchWorks.nl]
On Behalf Of Dave T.
Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 9:59 AM
To: hpux-admin@dutchworks.nl
Subject: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a VA7410
We have a VA7410 in production, but now we need more disk space in
development. Management wants to use space on the production VA to
accommodate the development need. I don't know any good arguments not to do
this, but I'm not comfortable with it. What are your opinions?
Thnx,
Dave
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