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January 20, 2005
Overhead Test Initial Impressions and Update
The overhead test configuration is progressing. Well actually it is ready to go. Over the last couple of days I figured out how to configure our labs switch, I also enabled the web configuration module for it so configuring it is very easy now. I figured out how to work the load balancer we got from OIT, that turned out to be a little bit of a pain but not bad. What I had the most trouble with was figuring out how our test network needed to be setup so that requests made to virtual machines through the load balancer would work. With Windows 2003 server you have to have the network setup so that the load balancer is the default gateway for the server. Currently each of the virtual machines has two network cards the second one being on a separate vlan where the load balancer is the default gateway. After I disabled the first network card, which also had a default gateway set, everything started working.
My initial impressions of the test so far is that with strictly static content we can put a lot of virtual machines on one box and have them all running without much problem. The current setup is nine virtual machines each with 250MB of ram and a single CPU. One problem with VMWare is that the virtual network cards are only 10Mb/s which I think makes them become network bound before anything else. I need to try the other vmware network driver to discover if it will give each VM a bigger pipe.
Currently with all 9 machines active and serving content to about 150 clients continuously we have about 65 percent CPU usage and the network is at about 90 Mb (what you would expect with 9 VMs that each have a 10 Mb pipe).
What I need to do now is run the actual tests. Meaning have the load balancer pointing at only one machine and then increse by one machine every couple of minutes. I'm afraid though that we are going to run into an issue of being network bound though which will make the tests less meaningful, hopefully the other network driver will work and give more throughput. I'll update this when I find out.
Update
The other network driver allows the virtual machines to have 1Gb connections so it looks like I need to change all of the other VMs.
Posted by nekstrom at January 20, 2005 01:43 PM
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