DRS Activity

During our troubleshooting times with AutoYaST we also had the opportunity to fiddle with the new Distributed Resource Scheduling option in VI3. While the option seems great we still haven’t got it to a point where we would be comfortable with it’s performance.

The option itself is great and really has some potential and VMotion has proved itself as well so on the technical side there are no worries. The issue we are struggling with at the moment is the way DRS decides when to move VM’s away from one machine and on to the other. Even at the most conservative setting we can’t do an installation of a VM without DRS deciding to start moving machines. During the course of our SLES installations we regularly had only the newly installing VM on one clusterserver and all the other VM’s on second because DRS decided to move them all away.

If anybody has similar experiences or tips in this area we would love to hear them.

AutoYaST final

Although there is some configuration work with AutoYaST still to be done we’ve managed to get a working SLES9 SP3 install going. The root cause of the problem were errors in our file repository config. We have used another AutoYaST repository where an installation of SLES9 with SP2 worked flawlessly. Updating it through the YaST Online Updater tool (YOU) to SP3 also presented no problems so it’s now just a question of getting the correct files in the correct order into the repository.

Both VM’s will be installed with Oracle Application Server. We will get some load off those environments to see how the testing cluster holds up and if there’s any impact on the performance side (positive or negative).