27-Aug-2008

Replacing Alphas

The production cluster here consists of four alphaservers in a homogenious cluster connected to some EVA storage. The goal in the near future is to migrate the applications running on these alphaservers to four replacement IA64 BL860c blade servers.

As a first step, I have built a separate four node cluster from the new Itanium based systems, and used a copy of the system disk that is currently booting the single IA64 machine they have in the development cluster to create a new system disk that will eventually end up as the production IA64 system disk.

The biggest hurdle (at least from my perspective) is that they do not want to change the nodenames of the machines as they replace them. So, I have to be careful that as the new machine is bought into the existing production cluster, I rename it to the appropriate thing.

Building the IA64 only cluster gives me the chance to configure things like TCP/IP Services, CIFS, Apache, and so on, to duplicate the services that are currently running in the production cluster.

Now all I have to do is get the application guys testing...

Posted at August 27, 2008 8:02 PM
Comments

Are you migrating from Pathworks to CIFS, or do they already use Samba on Alpha?

Posted by: Kel at August 30, 2008 2:18 PM

Ah yes, CIFS. Unfortunately, the business depends rather heavily on Advanced Server. CIFS is a rather untested/untried solution, and it's one of the the things that's concerning me at the moment.

It's been installed on the development IA64, and I documented how to set up a share a couple of weeks ago. Of course, yesterday a developer asked me about it, and to my amazement, it's no longer working.

And the documentation from HP is terrible. They just redirect you to the SAMBA website. Not good.

Posted by: Jim Duff at August 30, 2008 2:48 PM

Further to my last comment, I reinstalled CIFS, and it's all working again. This is a worry, as I certainly am not aware of anything I did to change the environment so that it stopped working...

Posted by: Jim Duff at September 2, 2008 6:38 PM

If all of your systems are connected to a SAN, why not keep one or two alphas in place running AdvancedServer? At least until CIFS has become mature anough the replace AS. It's quite a different beast, and as you will find out, requires quite some setup, tuning and testing before it can replace AS. It also depends on the number of concurrent users. A lot of them means a lot of extra processes at the moment.

It gives you (and HP) extra time (3 years, at least) to get CIFS in such a state it can actually replace AS.

Posted by: SYSMGR at September 8, 2008 9:34 PM

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