N3088

For the first time I’m teaching the Novell Course N3088 Administering Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 for Linux.

It’s a great course for IT Guy’s (or Woman, because in this course I also have one woman following the course) who have administrating Netware for the couple of past years and who are now making the switch to OES 2 for Linux.

The objects were are looking at are:

  • Installing OES
  • eDirectory Maintenance and Designing
  • Rights on eDirectory and the filesystem
  • NCP server
  • Iprint
  • DNS/DHCP for Novell

For more info on the N3088 look at novell.com

N2000 Novell Networking and Services for Linux

This week I’m giving the course N2000 (Novell Networking and Services for Linux) for the first time.

It pretty muts covers the basics of all service Novell has for Linux. We are going to look at SLED10, SLES10, OES2, Dirxml, Groupwise, ZCM10 and eDirectory.

The 2 students I have are teachers at a ROC (higher education) in de province Friesland. The are going to teach there student more about Novell en Linux. Glad to see that there will be more Linux at school!

NSS Performance with VMFS and ISCSI

ate I have done some testing with NSS and Vmware ESX. And I must say, I’m quite disappointed about the performance! Exspecially with NSS on VMFS with ISCSI. I had the following setup:

One virtual machine with Novell Open Enterprise server 2 on Vmware ESX 3.5 U2. This virtual machine has his VMDK on a local VMFS volume and a second disk witch is a RDM on a ISCSI SAN (Netapp).

I tested the disk performace with a program called Bonnie++ with the following parameters:

bonnie++ -s 2000M -d [path to volume] -v 3

Why a file size of 2000M on three volumes, simple, it’s more than twice the memory so Linux can’t cash the file in his memory.

And here are the results:

Per Char Per Block Rewrite Per Char Per Block 04K -3
MB K/Sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU
SLES10 SP1 NSS with VMFS on local storage 6000M 23818 80,8 34224 33,1 13242 1,3 8849 11,8 20194 0,5 323,4 3
SLES10 SP1 NSS with VMFS on ISCSI storage 6000M 8952 64,6 11981 36,6 10084 5,3 6540 22,4 16775 4,3 240,8 2,2
SLES10 SP1 NSS, RDM on ISCSI storage 6000M 20384 77 27691 39 10468 0 8780 36 7327 6 289,9 2

So as you see, the combination of NSS, VMFS and ISCSI is killing. I don’t know exactly wath is causing this, but I think it has something to do with block alligment.

Also I did some testing with VMI. I had to install SLES10 SP2 for this, so I can test NSS at this moment. I’ve download the beta of OES2 sp1 but I haven’t had the time to test this.

Sequential Output (nosync) Sequential Sequential Input
Per Char Per Block Rewrite Per Char Per Block 04K -3
MB K/Sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU
SLES10 SP2 Binary ReiserFS (Test 1) 6000M 33210 98.0 47718 8,6 19611 4,9 26668 62.1 61563 10,9 1784.8 1,7
SLES10 SP2 Binary ReiserFS (Test 2) 6000M 29833 95.2 51545 9,5 21652 5,6 26205 61.2 61651 10,2 1755.2 9,3
SLES10 SP2 Binary ReiserFS (Test 3) 6000M 32423 96.3 53426 9,7 22062 1,6 25748 60.3 61361 10,2 1867.4 9,3
SLES10 SP2 VMI ReiserFS (Test 1) 6000M 34713 97.9 55265 8,8 21152 1,1 24450 47.0 52107 0,6 1744.5 0,3
SLES10 SP2 VMI ReiserFS (Test 1) 6000M 33526 95.9 52340 8,9 21034 1,1 24695 47.1 57298 1,1 1839.1 1,1
SLES10 SP2 VMI ReiserFS (Test 1) 6000M 32762 93.5 49264 8,2 21671 1,0 25136 48.9 56911 0,9 1720.8 1,1

The disk performance doesn’t increase but the CPU load is lower. So this is interesting. When I have more time I will test the VMI setup with NSS.

I will do some more testing this and the next month, so check this post frequently!