[p4] P4d running under VMWare

[Buster]

Does anyone have any experience running a Perforce server on a virtual
server such as VMWare? Does it work? Is there any value?

My IT group is thinking of moving most of the back end production
servers (email, database, ERP, etc) to virtual servers and they'd like
to move P4D as well. It does make some sense - better load balancing,
backup, disaster recover, etc. I haven't really look too much at it but
on the surface it seems like it would work.

Thanks for any replies,
Andrew

[Thierry Lam]

We do have a test p4d running on a VM but it's not used heavily. So far, things are doing pretty well, just like a regular p4d on a physical server. You can give it a shot and see how it goes.

Thierry

On 31/07/08 9:55 AM, "Buster" <***@speakeasy.net> wrote:

Does anyone have any experience running a Perforce server on a virtual
server such as VMWare? Does it work? Is there any value?

My IT group is thinking of moving most of the back end production
servers (email, database, ERP, etc) to virtual servers and they'd like
to move P4D as well. It does make some sense - better load balancing,
backup, disaster recover, etc. I haven't really look too much at it but
on the surface it seems like it would work.

Thanks for any replies,
Andrew
_______________________________________________
perforce-user mailing list - perforce-***@perforce.com
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user

[Jamison, Shawn]

I have 5 out of 6 of my perforce servers running as VM Guests. One of
them is used very heavily with 500 users, 100-200 of them active at any
given time.

You just need to scale the VM host to have the horsepower to run the
various VM guests.


-Shawn Jamison>
Ciena Corp.
Perforce Admin

-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-***@perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-***@perforce.com] On Behalf Of Thierry Lam
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 10:44 AM
To: Buster; perforce-***@perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] P4d running under VMWare

We do have a test p4d running on a VM but it's not used heavily. So
far, things are doing pretty well, just like a regular p4d on a physical
server. You can give it a shot and see how it goes.

Thierry

On 31/07/08 9:55 AM, "Buster" <***@speakeasy.net> wrote:

Does anyone have any experience running a Perforce server on a virtual
server such as VMWare? Does it work? Is there any value?

My IT group is thinking of moving most of the back end production
servers (email, database, ERP, etc) to virtual servers and they'd like
to move P4D as well. It does make some sense - better load balancing,
backup, disaster recover, etc. I haven't really look too much at it but
on the surface it seems like it would work.

Thanks for any replies,
Andrew
_______________________________________________
perforce-user mailing list - perforce-***@perforce.com
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user

_______________________________________________
perforce-user mailing list - perforce-***@perforce.com
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user

[Damian Van Dooren]

Guillaume, Shawn,

I'm curious as to what you guys have defined for your resources for
your perforce VMs that handle 500 + users. How much RAM have you
assigned? And how are your disks setup, ie. are you running the
database on a VMFS volume, RAW LUN, or NFS, likewise for the depot
files?

Guillaume, I've read recently that version 3.5 of ESX now handles
multiple CPU VMs a lot better since they've updated their algorithms,
and no longer need to wait for all cores to free up to give the VM the
resources it needs. So I was just wondering which version of ESX that
you were running?

Cheers,
- Damian

Post by Jamison, Shawn
I have 5 out of 6 of my perforce servers running as VM Guests. One of
them is used very heavily with 500 users, 100-200 of them active at any
given time.
You just need to scale the VM host to have the horsepower to run the
various VM guests.
-Shawn Jamison>
Ciena Corp.
Perforce Admin
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 10:44 AM
Subject: Re: [p4] P4d running under VMWare
We do have a test p4d running on a VM but it's not used heavily. So
far, things are doing pretty well, just like a regular p4d on a physical
server. You can give it a shot and see how it goes.
Thierry
Does anyone have any experience running a Perforce server on a virtual
server such as VMWare? Does it work? Is there any value?
My IT group is thinking of moving most of the back end production
servers (email, database, ERP, etc) to virtual servers and they'd like
to move P4D as well. It does make some sense - better load balancing,
backup, disaster recover, etc. I haven't really look too much at it but
on the surface it seems like it would work.
Thanks for any replies,
Andrew
_______________________________________________
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user
_______________________________________________
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user
_______________________________________________
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user

[Jamison, Shawn]

Has anyone used the P4 server's auditing feature and if you have what
you were you able to accomplish?


I have several "new" admins that are not under my direct control and I
would like a detailed log of what they are doing and was hoping that the
audit log would be of use.

Thanks
-Shawn Jamison>
Ciena Corp.
Perforce Admin

[Lee Marzke]

Post by Buster
My IT group is thinking of moving most of the back end production
servers (email, database, ERP, etc) to virtual servers and they'd like
to move P4D as well.

My client is moving all servers to VI/3 as well. It's working very well.

Post by Buster
I'm curious as to what you guys have defined for your resources for
?your perforce VMs that handle 500 + users. How much RAM have you
assigned?

Perforce has a sizing info here:
http://kb.perforce.com/HardwareOsNe..rkReference/HardwareIssues/RecommendedH..figurations

This is just as valid on a VM.

The other questions are really dependent on your hardware. For
instance VI/3 with
NetApps are really recommended to run over NFS, but other HW may have
other
recommendations.

VMware recommends you use 1CPU until it gets swamped. I think
ESX3.5 recommends
that no more than half the cores available in 1 socket be allocated to a
VM. ( Quad core
CPU -> 2 CPU's max per VM ) I'd think you would run out of RAM or
Disk before using
2 cpu fully.

Lee Marzke
Infrastructure Consultant,
PCP

Post by Buster
Guillaume, Shawn,
I'm curious as to what you guys have defined for your resources for
your perforce VMs that handle 500 + users. How much RAM have you
assigned? And how are your disks setup, ie. are you running the
database on a VMFS volume, RAW LUN, or NFS, likewise for the depot
files?
Guillaume, I've read recently that version 3.5 of ESX now handles
multiple CPU VMs a lot better since they've updated their algorithms,
and no longer need to wait for all cores to free up to give the VM the
resources it needs. So I was just wondering which version of ESX that
you were running?
Cheers,
- Damian

Post by Jamison, Shawn
I have 5 out of 6 of my perforce servers running as VM Guests. One of
them is used very heavily with 500 users, 100-200 of them active at any
given time.
You just need to scale the VM host to have the horsepower to run the
various VM guests.
-Shawn Jamison>
Ciena Corp.
Perforce Admin
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 10:44 AM
Subject: Re: [p4] P4d running under VMWare
We do have a test p4d running on a VM but it's not used heavily. So
far, things are doing pretty well, just like a regular p4d on a physical
server. You can give it a shot and see how it goes.
Thierry
Does anyone have any experience running a Perforce server on a virtual
server such as VMWare? Does it work? Is there any value?
My IT group is thinking of moving most of the back end production
servers (email, database, ERP, etc) to virtual servers and they'd like
to move P4D as well. It does make some sense - better load balancing,
backup, disaster recover, etc. I haven't really look too much at it but
on the surface it seems like it would work.
Thanks for any replies,
Andrew
_______________________________________________
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user
_______________________________________________
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user
_______________________________________________
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user

[G Barthelemy]

Post by Damian Van Dooren
I'm curious as to what you guys have defined for your resources for
your perforce VMs that handle 500 + users. How much RAM have you
assigned? And how are your disks setup, ie. are you running the
database on a VMFS volume, RAW LUN, or NFS, likewise for the depot
files?

I have 2 CPUs (I am not convinced 2 are necessary, based on ESX's
performance graphs, only maybe when doing the weekly p4 verify's MD5
computation). 12GB of RAM, which is still more than the size of the
db.rev table and we don't have 600 users on the system at the same
time. Anyway we are not swapping yet, but we are watching this closely
and will probably up this soon as we grow.

Storage-wise, a NetApp aggregate used to be presented to the ESX host
over iSCSI, on which 3 VMDKs were created (one for the journal, one
for the DB, one for the RCS store). Recently, we have switched from
iSCSI to NFS for ESX's storage.

Our next move will be to have the VM handle the storage (rather than
the ESX host), using snapdrive.

Post by Damian Van Dooren
Guillaume, I've read recently that version 3.5 of ESX now handles
multiple CPU VMs a lot better since they've updated their algorithms,
and no longer need to wait for all cores to free up to give the VM the
resources it needs. So I was just wondering which version of ESX that
you were running?

Indeed, we were running 3.0.2 at the time. We are on 3.5 now, but
anyway I don't think Perforce needs more than 2 (or even 1) CPU in our
present setup.

Guilllaume

[Damian Van Dooren]

Thanks for the info. I'm looking at the possibilities of virtualizing
our Perforce server in the future because of the added HA/VMotion
abilities as well as reducing the complexity for a DR site.


On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 10:57 AM, G Barthelemy

Post by G Barthelemy

Post by Damian Van Dooren
I'm curious as to what you guys have defined for your resources for
your perforce VMs that handle 500 + users. How much RAM have you
assigned? And how are your disks setup, ie. are you running the
database on a VMFS volume, RAW LUN, or NFS, likewise for the depot
files?

I have 2 CPUs (I am not convinced 2 are necessary, based on ESX's
performance graphs, only maybe when doing the weekly p4 verify's MD5
computation). 12GB of RAM, which is still more than the size of the
db.rev table and we don't have 600 users on the system at the same
time. Anyway we are not swapping yet, but we are watching this closely
and will probably up this soon as we grow.
Storage-wise, a NetApp aggregate used to be presented to the ESX host
over iSCSI, on which 3 VMDKs were created (one for the journal, one
for the DB, one for the RCS store). Recently, we have switched from
iSCSI to NFS for ESX's storage.
Our next move will be to have the VM handle the storage (rather than
the ESX host), using snapdrive.

Post by Damian Van Dooren
Guillaume, I've read recently that version 3.5 of ESX now handles
multiple CPU VMs a lot better since they've updated their algorithms,
and no longer need to wait for all cores to free up to give the VM the
resources it needs. So I was just wondering which version of ESX that
you were running?

Indeed, we were running 3.0.2 at the time. We are on 3.5 now, but
anyway I don't think Perforce needs more than 2 (or even 1) CPU in our
present setup.
Guilllaume

[Brad Holt]

I've got one of my servers on a VM slice (Windows 2003). It works fine, but it does seem slower. It's not so much of a problem as the database is quite young and the team still small. I would expect that as the database gets bigger, I will have to get it on a real server though. Sorry I can't give you real numbers. I've grown and run 10 p4 servers now, and this one feels noticeably slower than it ought to. This could well be because the resources are getting hogged by some other slice running on that machine. I can't really know unfortunately.

Anyway, I can say that the server has not crashed or corrupted now, and it has been up for about 6 months. So I can say that it seems stable enough at its present size.

-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-***@perforce.com [mailto:perforce-user-***@perforce.com] On Behalf Of Buster
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 6:55 AM
To: perforce-***@perforce.com
Subject: [p4] P4d running under VMWare

Does anyone have any experience running a Perforce server on a virtual
server such as VMWare? Does it work? Is there any value?

My IT group is thinking of moving most of the back end production
servers (email, database, ERP, etc) to virtual servers and they'd like
to move P4D as well. It does make some sense - better load balancing,
backup, disaster recover, etc. I haven't really look too much at it but
on the surface it seems like it would work.

Thanks for any replies,
Andrew
_______________________________________________
perforce-user mailing list - perforce-***@perforce.com
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user

[Lee Marzke]

That's expected on the Free VMware server, if that's what your using you
really need to
consider migration to VI/3 or the new Free ESXi version that came out
Monday and good shared
storage ( SAS or FC ) on lots of spindles. The performance of shared
storage varies widely.

With all the Disaster Recovery and provisioning support in VI/3 I can't
see any reason
to not phase out all physical servers. Even if an complete ESX server
dies, all the VM's
just automatically start on one of the other ESX boxes, which avoids a
big headache.

Lee Marzke
Infrastructure Consultant, PCP

Post by Brad Holt
I've got one of my servers on a VM slice (Windows 2003). It works fine, but it does seem slower. It's not so much of a problem as the database is quite young and the team still small. I would expect that as the database gets bigger, I will have to get it on a real server though. Sorry I can't give you real numbers. I've grown and run 10 p4 servers now, and this one feels noticeably slower than it ought to. This could well be because the resources are getting hogged by some other slice running on that machine. I can't really know unfortunately.
Anyway, I can say that the server has not crashed or corrupted now, and it has been up for about 6 months. So I can say that it seems stable enough at its present size.
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 6:55 AM
Subject: [p4] P4d running under VMWare
Does anyone have any experience running a Perforce server on a virtual
server such as VMWare? Does it work? Is there any value?
My IT group is thinking of moving most of the back end production
servers (email, database, ERP, etc) to virtual servers and they'd like
to move P4D as well. It does make some sense - better load balancing,
backup, disaster recover, etc. I haven't really look too much at it but
on the surface it seems like it would work.
Thanks for any replies,
Andrew
_______________________________________________
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user
_______________________________________________
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user

[Matt Janulewicz]

At the last place I worked we ran P4D on a Linux virtual server (VMWare.) It worked just fine but I didn't like it, mostly for political reasons.

The virtual machine was on a server with other virtual machines and if something went wrong it affected them all. Maybe they were overtaxing the system or it just wasn't set up correctly, but Perforce would go down once in a while because the only 'solution' was to reboot the VMWare server.

Free memory and disk access speed is critical for Perforce performance and something tells me that the added layer of the virtual machine wouldn't be helping anything, though I never did any tests.

If you shuffle through the white papers and presentations from the Perforce conferences you'll notice that the one thing that's never talked about is running a mission critical system such as source control on a virtual server. There must be a reason for that.


-Matt



-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-***@perforce.com on behalf of Buster
Sent: Thu 7/31/2008 6:55 AM
To: perforce-***@perforce.com
Subject: [p4] P4d running under VMWare

Does anyone have any experience running a Perforce server on a virtual
server such as VMWare? Does it work? Is there any value?

My IT group is thinking of moving most of the back end production
servers (email, database, ERP, etc) to virtual servers and they'd like
to move P4D as well. It does make some sense - better load balancing,
backup, disaster recover, etc. I haven't really look too much at it but
on the surface it seems like it would work.

Thanks for any replies,
Andrew
_______________________________________________
perforce-user mailing list - perforce-***@perforce.com
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user

[Jeff A. Bowles]

Uhh.
Every encounter I've had with a "virtual disk" situation, which involved
high throughput to a storage medium, left me wanting. (The exceptions are
RAID, which is almost by definition a virtual disk, and a memory-disk
subsystem I've see written up, recently.)

The question is, how many copies-of-data will happen from the magnetic
medium to the 'p4d' address space? Real-disk-to-virtual-disk-buffer,
then... then... then...

I think that there are some real-time performance measurements to examine,
first. Are there "guarantees" (like some real-time OS timing guarantees) on
disk performance to any specific instance of an OS?

The goal is noble, but if you need it to perform, you will have to ask
questions about "real" disk performance. (It's not just about allocating
space or network ports.)

-Jeff Bowles

Post by Buster
Does anyone have any experience running a Perforce server on a virtual
server such as VMWare? Does it work? Is there any value?
My IT group is thinking of moving most of the back end production
servers (email, database, ERP, etc) to virtual servers and they'd like
to move P4D as well. It does make some sense - better load balancing,
backup, disaster recover, etc. I haven't really look too much at it but
on the surface it seems like it would work.
Thanks for any replies,
Andrew
_______________________________________________
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user

[G Barthelemy]

Post by Buster
Does anyone have any experience running a Perforce server on a virtual
server such as VMWare? Does it work? Is there any value?

Our production Perforce server runs as an ESX VM since September 2006.
In fact I have 2 production servers that are under ESX, as well as the
occasional test server. It does work well. We find there is little
overhead from running virtualised, so performance hasn't really been
an issue for us: about 600 users on the main one, the VM runs RedHat 4
x86, 32 bit (but planning to move to 64 bit soon), hosts are HP DL385
or 585, and storage is all (including the O/S itself) on NetApp G7
over iSCSI.

For us the value is mainly about disaster recovery. Our datacentre is
replicated so if it was to go up in flames, the Perforce VM could be
brought up within seconds in the spare datacentre with the same IP
address.

We found that the Perforce VM doesn't like to co-exist with other VM's
that are memory and I/O intensive such as DB servers, even if
resources are reserved. Then performance can get sluggish despite the
ESX performance graphs not maxing out... There are also some gotchas
to watch out for: for example, our virtual instance runs much better
with 2 CPUs rather than with 4 (I used to specify 4, but that was a
mistake). That's because ESX would wait for 4 cores to be available to
give a slot to the VM. It'll have a better chance of giving your VM
CPU time if it has to wait for fewer CPUs to be available. Perforce
doesn't need the CPUs, however it does need the RAM, so insist in
getting sufficient RAM. Even if it means that your VM is going to ride
solo on its ESX host.

Anecdotally, we've had to V-motion the Perforce VM a couple of times
between physical hosts, while under load (about 12 operations per
second on average, middle of the day). It went without a glitch,
nobody noticed anything, which is credit to this technology.