Dec
4
2008
Novell just released OES2 SP1.
You can download the software here.
For more information on SP1 read my other blog on this subject. Shortly I will post how to upgrade from OES2 (SP0)
Nov
27
2008
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
Nov
19
2008
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!
Nov
3
2008
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!
Oct
28
2008
Today and yesterday I gave the course PB-VM-ESX (Pratical Vmware ESX).
The are 3 student and one of them is Andre from Ictivity (for whom I’m giving this course). The default exercises where to easy for him, so instead of doing the exercises with Microsoft Windows, I let him do the exercises with SLES10 SP2 with VMI support. He did some test with it who I will hope to post over here.
Now I’m in the last half hour and the students are working with Snapshots.
