[HPADM] SUMMARY: Melding Development & Production Environments on a VA7410

From: Dave T. (davidlt77_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 10/15/03

  • Next message: Joe Atkinson: "[HPADM] Mail displays out of order"
    To: hpux-admin@dutchworks.nl
    Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 14:04:36 -0400
    
    

    Thank you to everyone who responded. Following are the responses, in the
    order I received them, to my question about hosting both a development and
    production environment on the same VA7410, with my original posts at the
    very bottom:

    ----Original Message Follows----
    From: "Rick Starr" <rstarr@bellsouth.net>
    To: "'Dave T.'" <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
    Subject: RE: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a
    VA7410
    Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:24:27 -0400

    David,

    Although there is no technical reason not to do this, In my humble opinion
    there are some things you may want to consider. Some of these consideration
    depend in the current configuration but I'll just throw out a few ideas.

    1) Your email does not mention whether these servers are direct connected or
    connected via fabric switches or what OS versio(s) . In the case they are
    connected via switches and both HP-UX and you have 4 FC controllers in the
    VA, I would recommend allocating 2 FC controllers to your production env and
    two for your dev env via switch zoning. This will accomplish two things. The
    first is traffic will be segregated allowing dedicated bandwidth for each
    env. Secondly, It is a bit more secure as you can present "Dev LUNS" down
    two channels and "Prod LUNS" down the other two channels.

    2) If you don't have Fabric switches and only have two FC controllers. The
    use of Secure LUN manger will accomplish the same separation except you will
    need to share bandwidth.

    3) In a best practice scenario you should try not to mix different HBA
    types, driver versions etc on the same Storage interface. Make sure that
    both prod and dev servers are at the latest supported levels for FC
    Interfaces (A6795A or A5158A) Being that the VA7410 utilizes a 2 GB
    interface it would behoove you to use the 2 GB A6795A HBA in your HP hosts.
    Also FC patches or patch levels are important. My point here is just beaware
    Of what and how you are connecting.

    4) If this is a Microsoft env. You will most certainly want to do zoning
    and/or secure luns manager as the Microsoft OS has a nasty habit of trying
    to write signatures to what ever luns it sees. If this is mixed with a HP-UX
    env what happens is the MS signature overwrites the HP voume group
    descriptor area.

    Hope this helps.

    Rick

    ********************************************************************************

    ----Original Message Follows----
    From: "Abramson, Stuart" <SAbramson@Wabtec.com>
    To: "'Dave T.'" <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
    Subject: RE: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a
    VA7410
    Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:33:06 -0400

    Pro:
    1. You do what you have to do. Principal isn't enough to justify
    spending money that you don't have.

    Con:
    1. The performance of the box should be tuned to the usage.
            o The production disk should be raid-1, because it's faster.
            o The development disk can be raid-5, which is slower, but is
    more cost-effective.
            o If that's the case, then you wouldn't want to put Production
    on the slower box, and you are wasting disk space to put Dev on the
    Producton disk.

    2. Any activity on the Production box adds load. Adding development
    space to the production disk could affect production performance.

    3. Adding dev space on the production disk, reduces the growth
    potential for the production box over time. (You have to measure/forecast
    your growth.)

    My experience has been that management will do what they need to do. If
    they are saying let's use PROD disk space for DEV until next budget year,
    and then we'll buy more space for DEV, then that will be fine.

            Stuart

    Stuart Abramson | Off: 412/825-1434 | Cell: 412/417-1567 | email:
    sabramson@wabtec.com

    ********************************************************************************

    ----Original Message Follows----
    From: "Schmidt, Claudiu {ISO~Grenzach}" <CLAUDIU.SCHMIDT@Roche.COM>
    To: "Dave T." <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
    Subject: RE: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a
    VA7410
    Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 16:31:21 +0200

    Hi Dave,

    We have 2 VA7410 in our environment, and had a lot of problems with
    them.
    On a VA you can not give certain aplications more performance then other
    aplications, so everybody gets the same performance. What kind of raid
    do you have configured on the VA? If you have autoraid, you have bad
    performance, if you have raid 0/1 you have less space. At raid 0/1 ,you
    shoud monitor tue free space! If freespace goes under 2 times
    diskcapacity, then ,at diskfailure VA will automaticaly move data from
    raid 0/1 to raid 5 to get more space, and this goes massive on the
    performance.
    VA is not the storage box where you shoud put critical data! We had 2
    times complete data loss, and once, they had to exchange one VA
    completely to get it working again.

    Rgds,

    Claudiu

    ********************************************************************************

    ----Original Message Follows----
    From: Ben Le <ble@pcc.edu>
    To: "Dave T." <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
    Subject: Re: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a
    VA7410
    Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 08:34:19 -0700

    Management wants management gets! You can create a special LUN on VA7410 for
    development use only.

    Ben

    ********************************************************************************

    ----Original Message Follows----
    From: <tvmyers@eng.delcoelect.com>
    To: davidlt77@hotmail.com (Dave T.)
    Subject: Re: [HPADM] UPDATE: Melding Development & Production Environments
    on a VA7410
    Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:34:32 -0500 (EST)

    > The environment is as follows:
    >
    > 1. HP-UX 11i production N4000 server with VA7410 attached via fiber.
    > 2. HP-UX 11.0 development N4000 server that management wants to connect
    to
    > the VA7410. In doing so, the development system would be connected via
    its
    > own two HBA cards.

    My first question would be: Do you have the Secure Manager product?
    That seems to be the only way to keep two servers from "touching" each
    other's
    LUNs. If they were both Production servers with all changes controlled by a
    configuration management system, I wouldn't worry so much. However, a
    development system tends not to use formal configuration change controls and
    without careful review, you could accidently overwrite a production LUN from
    the devlopment server. It's as simple as a typo in a pvcreate command.
    Believe me, I know THAT one from painful experience.

    Beyond that, I don't see why a va7410 couldn't easily supply the performance
    demands of two N4000 servers. We couldn't saturate it's predecessor, a
    va7400, with three A500/550 servers in a fully switched, dual-fabric
    environment.

                                            Cheers, tom

    --
    Tom Myers, Information Systems Engineer; Delphi Corporation,
    IS&S - KAT Unix Admin, M/S CT200, P.O. Box 9005, Kokomo IN 46904-9005
    E-Mail: tvmyers@eng.delcoelect.com  Voice: 765-451-0918
    ********************************************************************************
    ----Original Message Follows----
    From: "Daniel H. Brown" <brown@brauhausdc.org>
    To: "Dave T." <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
    Subject: Re: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a 
    VA7410
    Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:16:27 -0400 (EDT)
    On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, Dave T. wrote:
     > Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 09:58:42 -0400
     > From: "Dave T." <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
     > To: hpux-admin@DutchWorks.nl
     > Subject: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a 
    VA7410
     >
     > We have a VA7410 in production, but now we need more disk space in
     > development.  Management wants to use space on the production VA to
     > accommodate the development need.  I don't know any good arguments not to 
    do
     > this, but I'm not comfortable with it.  What are your opinions?
    Anything which adds "risk" to an environment will likely adversely affect
    "uptime." Using a production system for development or test adds risk.
    And,
    The more uptime you want, the more resources you'll need to apply.
    Resourses include cpu, disk, network, time, sysadmin, etc -- all of which
    can be expressed as money.
    --
    Dan Brown
    brown@brauhausdc.org
    ********************* ORIGINAL POSTS BELOW 
    **************************************
    ----Original Message Follows----
    From: "Dave T." <davidlt77@hotmail.com>
    To: hpux-admin@dutchworks.nl
    Subject: [HPADM] UPDATE:  Melding Development & Production Environments on a 
    VA7410
    Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:30:54 -0400
    The environment is as follows:
    1.  HP-UX 11i production N4000 server with VA7410 attached via fiber.
    2.  HP-UX 11.0 development N4000 server that management wants to connect to 
    the VA7410.  In doing so, the development system would be connected via its 
    own two HBA cards.
    Dave
    -----Original Message-----
    From: hpux-admin-owner@DutchWorks.nl [mailto:hpux-admin-owner@DutchWorks.nl]
    On Behalf Of Dave T.
    Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 9:59 AM
    To: hpux-admin@dutchworks.nl
    Subject: [HPADM] Melding Development & Production Environments on a VA7410
    We have a VA7410 in production, but now we need more disk space in
    development.  Management wants to use space on the production VA to
    accommodate the development need.  I don't know any good arguments not to do
    this, but I'm not comfortable with it.  What are your opinions?
    Thnx,
    Dave
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