TeamSite on a virutal machine in production environments?

Hi

Virtual Machines (VM) become more and more popular these days. I wonder if anyone has used VM for TeamSite in a production environment. Information like OS used, TeamSite version and what kind of VM are welcome.

Advantages and disadvantages to use VM in production environments are welcome too.

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
civ3.

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Adam Stoller

Hi

Virtual Machines (VM) become more and more popular these days. I wonder if anyone has used VM for TeamSite in a production environment. Information like OS used, TeamSite version and what kind of VM are welcome.

Advantages and disadvantages to use VM in production environments are welcome too.

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
civ3.

Yes - I've done so at several customer sites. The VM [software] being used was that which was listed as supported by IWOV. The OS on the VM was one which was documented as supported by IWOV. The TS versions have varied from 6.5 to 6.7.2 and I'm sure will continue to be used with 7.x and beyond.

The advantages are mostly financial to the customer - no additional hardware servers need to be purchased and set up.

As long as you make sure that you have the CPU and RAM resources configured for the VM, I don't know that there are any particular disadvantages, though I will admit that I have not done any extensive stress testing of such environments - just helped get them setup and haven't heard of any issues with regard to the VM server since then.

nipper

There will be a performance hit when using a VM. It is not bad, but it is there. The advantages far outweigh the issues.

Snapshots are the biggest plus, being able quickly roll anything back is quite nice. Being able to move hardware is huge.

My last project uses VMWare in their production web environment, so anytime you buy a plane ticket or make seat assignments, etc that is through a VM. If it is good enough for the production web environment it is sufficient for the CMS

Jamik

We have our dev and qa environments in VM instances, but we left our production TS server as a standalone machine. We found performance in our setup was just too poor. We set up dev to mirror the resources that production had and pages took on average 16 sec or more to load which as a web tool is unacceptible to our users who are use to the sub 8 second load times of current production. Now that's not to say you can't use VM in production, this was just our experience, and I'm not sure I trust the guys who run the VM servers that they're allowing proper resource allocations (I think they are a bit too conservative here). SO you're experience may vary, but as others have said resource allocation is key to making sure you get the performance you need.

Bjorn

Everything everyone else has said, plus:

VMs tend to do better with CPU-intensive stuff than I/O-intensive stuff. Would you call TeamSite a CPU-intensive or an I/O-intensive app? Also, depending on your organization and what type of OS, you may find the complications of your VM licensing costs, OS licensing costs, DB licensing costs, etc. and any hardware upgrades required to beef up your VM-ized physical box(es) to make the "consolidation cost" benefits a wash. Or maybe you'll save bundles of cash. It all depends.

Like Jamik said, give it a trial run with your current TeamSite implementation in a dev/qa environment, stress it and see if you like the results.

Crsb

We set up dev to mirror the resources that production had and pages took ....

I think that is where you are loosing performance. Since there is an extra layer of software between the application and the hardware in your VM env than in traditional env, mirroring the resources wouldn't be a fair comparison. i would give more resources to something running on a vm.

... and I'm not sure I trust the guys who run the VM servers that they're allowing proper resource allocations (I think they are a bit too conservative here). SO you're experience may vary, but as others have said resource allocation is key to making sure you get the performance you need.

i am doing a setup in a vm env next month, the guys here are also conservative when it comes to resources allocation. but we will be allocating more resources in the vm env than we have in the current env. as Andy mentioned, the good thing about the vm env is that you can bump up the resources anything you need to as long as you have them available, which is the case here.
we currently have a TS 671SP1 on RH4 server with 2 X 3.0 Ghz CPU, 4GB of RAM and 40 GB for install directory, it is not using much CPU but it has memory issues since we got folders with 1000s of files that get loaded from time to time...
the vm server will be TS 672SP2 on RH5, 2 X 2.2Ghz CPU, 8GB of RAM and 20 GB for install directory. so we should be ok.

LooseCannon

Our production env is running on a VM. Initially we saw performance issues with running PERL scripts that perform I/O operations, like parsing XML files, but the OS guys tuned it up and all is good.

Bjorn

Our production env is running on a VM. Initially we saw performance issues with running PERL scripts that perform I/O operations, like parsing XML files, but the OS guys tuned it up and all is good.

What's your prod env. look like? I mean, concurrent users and stuff like that.

LooseCannon

What's your prod env. look like? I mean, concurrent users and stuff like that.

I don't know much about the env other than we have about 1000 users and running VMware with 4vCPUs. If you have any specific questions I can pass them along to our OS group.

mart2001

There's a kb article on interwoven's old support site stating that it supports vmware... Don't know if it supports any other virtualization software, but I heard that they have LDOM working for Solaris also. But there was suppose to be about a 40% hit on performance.... But that kb article is a couple of years old, with improve cpu and virtualization software, it might not be as bad anymore.

civ3

Thanks for all who posted back.

First I forgot to mention in my first post that Autonomy (or Interwoven) officially support deploy TeamSite in VMware environment as long as the Windows version is listed as a compatible version according to the documentation for 6.7.2 under Windows. I guess this would be correct for 6.5 and later. I remember it was mentioned in a KB but forget where it is.

My experience is that TeamSite is more I/O intensive and/or memory intensive than CPU intensive. I found a KB today which seems to confirm this. The URL is https://customers.autonomy.com/support/secure/docs/FAQ/Interwoven/2197.html.

In my own opinion, I wouldn't run TeamSite on a virtual machine in production environment. Our Teamsite is run under Windows. And Autonomy don't recommend to go for VMware either, which worries me too. That is why I would like to seek real-world experience on this subject. I have no problem to use virtual machines for development, test and QA environments.

Keep posting your feedback and experience. Thanks all again.

By the way, a bit off topic. Bjorn mentioned to stress test TeamSite server. Anyone has idea about how to do that? I only did stress test for web servers before, which is easy to do. I assume it is much harder to stress test a TeamSite server.

civ3.

Bjorn

By the way, a bit off topic. Bjorn mentioned to stress test TeamSite server. Anyone has idea about how to do that? I only did stress test for web servers before, which is easy to do. I assume it is much harder to stress test a TeamSite server.

Fom a practical perspective, it's easy enough to use the same types of products you would use to stress (or load) test any random website to test a TeamSite server via its two UIs. Call it holistic stress testing, if you like.

It's not like you have to reach into the box and barrage it with a bunch of specific I/O operations or something. You don't need to know how fast a certain file operation may return as much as how much performance you can pull off with a certain configuration -- or what kind of configuration you'll need to achieve an acceptable level of performance. Barrage the server with a certain operation, then start taking away resources and see what happens.

With your stress testing software, you can throw a number of scenarios at the server using test users in the UI. For example, how does the environment respond with 5 users all regenerating 1000 files at once? Or what about 1000 users all regenerating 5 files at once? Or what about, 40 users all looking up unique user info from CC Pro at once? You write your tests to meet your needs and you're good to go, at least as much as anyone could be.

Maybe I'm not understanding your question.

aby_sam

I've been reading all your posts. Support recommended not to move to a virtualized system, but do you experts have any thoughts on this my requirement below.

Our application is analyzing to move our TeamSite 6.7.1 SP1 (iwserver: 6.7.1 Build 70160 Interwoven 20080409) and OpenDeploy 6.2 (Version 6.2.0.0.0 Build 68916 Interwoven 20071109) from stand-alone server to VMware ESX 3.5 virtualization. We are on RedHat Linux AS 4.x.
Please let me know whether there are any issues with license, content store or product, if we use stand-alone to VMware migration tools for this effort. Thanks.

aby_sam

The OS on the VM was one which was documented as supported by IWOV. The TS versions have varied from 6.5 to 6.7.2 and I'm sure will continue to be used with 7.x and beyond.

Adam,
Can you please tell me the VM softwares you have used. Does that include VMware ESX 3.5 or 4.0? Thanks.

nipper

I have done mulitple implementations on VM and never have know exactly what level of VM was running. That is an infrastructure issue. Your IT team should have recommended configurations and you can use them. The only issue I have run across was one team set it up on somethiing that would sleep after inactivity, not a really good thing for a server.

Andy

Adam Stoller

Adam,
Can you please tell me the VM softwares you have used. Does that include VMware ESX 3.5 or 4.0? Thanks.

To be perfectly honest, I don't remember which it was - but it was whatever version that was documented in the product manuals as being supported.
Beyond that, all my experience with VMWare has been limited to virtual Windows servers - Nipper's had much more experience with Linux

nipper

Adam,
Can you please tell me the VM softwares you have used. Does that include VMware ESX 3.5 or 4.0? Thanks.

My current project was on ESXi and is moving to vSphere, which is vmware's data center product. That was an IT decision and we just get the server.

aby_sam

Thanks Nipper and Adam..

Nipper, have you rehosted an existing TS & OD to VM without the usual TS version upgrade steps, just using the virtualization tools. I 'm curious to know how you handled the content store.

nipper

Thanks Nipper and Adam..

Nipper, have you rehosted an existing TS & OD to VM without the usual TS version upgrade steps, just using the virtualization tools. I 'm curious to know how you handled the content store.

My experience has been on new installs. Now we have moved VMs from one server to another which is quite easy. I have also added disk to existing VMs (Workstation when you predefined the disk).

aby_sam

Thanks buddy. I can present my case with this info.

civ3

Our production env is running on a VM. Initially we saw performance issues with running PERL scripts that perform I/O operations, like parsing XML files, but the OS guys tuned it up and all is good.

Hi LooseCannon

I am interested in what your OS guys did to tune the vm up. Could you provide a bit more details on this? Thanks.

civ.