VMWARE and Informix Databases

Posted in 2007

kate — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:35:41 — source: IIUG Forums & Mailing Lists

Hi all, I need to know what your experience has been with Informix v11 on VMWare with Linux. Has anyone tested whether we need to allocate two virtual CPUs to make the parallization work best as we did with previous versions, or is this useless since under the covers their is really only one CPU anyway? Thanks! Kate Tomchik [ kate@iiug.org ] www.iiug.org International Informix Users Group Board of Directors See you at the IIUG Informix Conference The Power Conference for Informix Professionals April 27 - 30, 2008 Overland Park, KS, USA http://www.iiug.org/conf

↪ replying to kate

Lello, Nick — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:56:35 — source: IIUG Forums & Mailing Lists

Hi, I am running several 11.10.xC2 engines on VMWare ESX VMs ; each VM has multiple vCPUs defined -- a single vCPU just made Informix performance horrid. All hosts are running Redhat Linux ES 4 -----Original Message----- From: ids-bounces@iiug.org [mailto:ids-bounces@iiug.org] On Behalf Of kate Sent: 13 December 2007 21:36 To: ids@iiug.org Subject: VMWARE and Informix Databases [10754] Hi all, I need to know what your experience has been with Informix v11 on VMWare with Linux. Has anyone tested whether we need to allocate two virtual CPUs to make the parallization work best as we did with previous versions, or is this useless since under the covers their is really only one CPU anyway? Thanks! Kate Tomchik [ kate@iiug.org ] www.iiug.org International Informix Users Group Board of Directors See you at the IIUG Informix Conference The Power Conference for Informix Professionals April 27 - 30, 2008 Overland Park, KS, USA http://www.iiug.org/conf ************************************************************************ ******* Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum.

↪ replying to Lello, Nick

Marcus Haarmann — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:03:36 — source: IIUG Forums & Mailing Lists

Hi, Generally (not depending on VMWare or not) it makes sense to configure IDS with more CPUVPS than physical CPUs or Cores. We have e.g. configured once a 4 processor SUN machine with 8 CPUVPS and it was running significantly better than with 4 CPUVPS. So it is worth a try to configure even more than 2 CPUVPS. Of course, in a virtual environment, you share the CPU with other instances maybe, so generating too much processor load could have a negative effect on other instances. But this is common independant of the types of application you run in such VMWare instances. Marcus -----Original Message----- From: Lello, Nick [mailto:Nick.Lello@nielsen.com] Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 11:57 AM To: ids@iiug.org Subject: RE: VMWARE and Informix Databases [10757] Hi, I am running several 11.10.xC2 engines on VMWare ESX VMs ; each VM has multiple vCPUs defined -- a single vCPU just made Informix performance horrid. All hosts are running Redhat Linux ES 4 -----Original Message----- From: ids-bounces@iiug.org [mailto:ids-bounces@iiug.org] On Behalf Of kate Sent: 13 December 2007 21:36 To: ids@iiug.org Subject: VMWARE and Informix Databases [10754] Hi all, I need to know what your experience has been with Informix v11 on VMWare with Linux. Has anyone tested whether we need to allocate two virtual CPUs to make the parallization work best as we did with previous versions, or is this useless since under the covers their is really only one CPU anyway? Thanks! Kate Tomchik [ kate@iiug.org ] www.iiug.org International Informix Users Group Board of Directors See you at the IIUG Informix Conference The Power Conference for Informix Professionals April 27 - 30, 2008 Overland Park, KS, USA http://www.iiug.org/conf ************************************************************************ ******* Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum. ************************************************************************ ******* Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum.

↪ replying to Marcus Haarmann

Richard Kofler — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:50:11 — source: IIUG Forums & Mailing Lists

Marcus Haarmann schrieb: > Hi, > > Generally (not depending on VMWare or not) it makes sense to configure > IDS with more CPUVPS than physical CPUs or Cores. We have e.g. > configured once a 4 processor SUN machine with 8 CPUVPS and it was > running significantly better than with 4 CPUVPS. So it is worth a try to > configure even more than 2 CPUVPS. > Of course, in a virtual environment, you share the CPU with other > instances maybe, so generating too much processor load could have a > negative effect on other instances. But this is common independant of > the types of application you run in such VMWare instances. > > Marcus > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lello, Nick [mailto:Nick.Lello@nielsen.com] > Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 11:57 AM > To: ids@iiug.org > Subject: RE: VMWARE and Informix Databases [10757] > > Hi, > > I am running several 11.10.xC2 engines on VMWare ESX VMs ; each VM has > multiple vCPUs defined -- a single vCPU just made Informix performance > horrid. > > All hosts are running Redhat Linux ES 4 > > -----Original Message----- > From: ids-bounces@iiug.org [mailto:ids-bounces@iiug.org] On Behalf Of > kate > Sent: 13 December 2007 21:36 > To: ids@iiug.org > Subject: VMWARE and Informix Databases [10754] > > Hi all, > I need to know what your experience has been with Informix v11 on VMWare > with Linux. Has anyone tested whether we need to allocate two virtual > CPUs to > > make the parallization work best as we did with previous versions, or is > this useless since under the covers their is really only one CPU anyway? > > Thanks! > Kate Tomchik [ kate@iiug.org ] www.iiug.org International Informix Users > Group Board of Directors > > See you at the IIUG Informix Conference The Power Conference for > Informix Professionals April 27 - 30, 2008 Overland Park, KS, USA > http://www.iiug.org/conf > > ************************************************************************ > ******* > Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum. > > ************************************************************************ > ******* > Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum. > > > ******************************************************************************* > Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum. > > Hia, virties here is a way I use to find out how far one may expect better performance from adding *vps (CPUvps but also AIOvps if there is no KIO[which is always bad]) I use sar (for Linux systems this comes with package sysstat) to find out how far number of context switches goes up, when I flood the system with cpu intensive processes, and uptime is like # of cpu threads * 5 This number of context switches will be the upper limit for increase of performance. Then I can see, if there is any headroom left and use this according to needs by ading more *vps to the virtual partitin where I need better performance. If you have too many processes in run-ready-state (as seen from a scheduler perspective) you will see a decrease in performance. A first rule of thumb may be to use uptime and to keep load avg (in the 1 min avg slot) around number of CPU-threds * 2, and not much higher. HTH dic_k -- Richard Kofler SOLID STATE EDV Dienstleistungen GmbH Vienna/Austria/Europe