-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:linux-...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of
William D Carroll
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 12:57 PM
To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU
Subject: Re: [LINUX-390] To kick or to clone ... that is the question
As I have said though
kickstart is faster if you do not need to format.
In our case we preformat dasd when we get it so this is not needed.
a point that seems to keep getting over looked.
and point out your test becomes 5 min for kickstart and 16 min for clone
if dasd is performated.
William 'Doug' Carroll
Mainframe Systems Eng Sr I
Global Technology Infrastructure
-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:linux-...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of
Hall, Ken (GTS)
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 12:51 PM
To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU
Subject: Re: To kick or to clone ... that is the question
Okay, I gave up and ran timings.
Our base system consists of 7 minidisks, for a total of 22,744
cylinders. About half of that (three volumes) is empty space in an LV
for a product that generates data after the system is up. The actual
base system is three minidisks, plus one swap disk, that roughly fits on
a 3390-9. It all has to be either formatted or copied.
Kickstart took 21 minutes to format all that, plus an additional 5
minutes (surprisingly) to install 491 packages, for a total of 26
minutes. The process failed in the end because of a bug in my
post-install script, but the system was manually bootable.
Our clone process took 16 minutes to sequentially copy the same 7 disks
via DDR. If you're clever, you can set up parallel service machines to
perform the copies at once and get it down to maybe 5 minutes total
(assuming your system isn't all on one disk). We had done this in a
previous incarnation of the Linux project, but our current method is
sequential.
As I said, the difference is significant in itself, but we're talking
minutes. Different combinations of disks with different numbers of
packages, and amounts of empty space will affect the results, so Your
Mileage May DEFINITELY Vary.
My main gripe with kickstart is that it's complicated, buggy (on z), and
badly documented (on z). I spent a lot of time fooling with it during
our original setup (gave up), once again later (when I was finally able
to get it to work), and because we may have to switch to using it, I'm
still trying to get it working properly in my "spare" time.
-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:linux-...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of
William D Carroll
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 11:04 AM
To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU
Subject: Re: [LINUX-390] To kick or to clone ... that is the question
I cannot agree with your statement
"Any way you cut it, there's still more overhead in kickstart, and it
still takes longer"
as I've stated unless you're using flashcopy (not available to everyone)
a DDR can take longer than a Kickstart, Real experience here with
kickstarting being faster than DDR's
kickstarting can be real simple as well. php to create the kickstart
pull IP and info from a DB/flatfile. server kickstarted and up in <5min
(if no dasdfmt needed)
I'm curious, how many have actually tried kickstarting servers and
really dived into it?
not just a sample kickstart and then didn't' like it. really looked at
it?
William 'Doug' Carroll
Mainframe Systems Eng Sr I
Global Technology Infrastructure
RedHat Certified Engineer: 805008304430937
-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:linux-...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of
Hall, Ken (GTS)
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 10:31 AM
To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU
Subject: Re: To kick or to clone ... that is the question
Well, actually, all our guests use hipersockets, for reasons I won't get
into, but we also use vswitch, and ping times going between two guests
on a vswitch are comparable to guests on the hipersocket.
Any way you cut it, there's still more overhead in kickstart, and it
still takes longer. Even cutting out the formatting time, you still
have to read the packages, send them over the network, and install them,
but in the end you're talking minutes. There are other advantages to
kickstart, I just wish it worked better and was better documented for
zSeries. I had a terrible time figuring out how to get it working the
first time, and a few of the parameters don't seem to work as advertised
(or at least didn't with RHEL5.2).
If you could put the kickstart file on the 191 disk, IPL the kernel,
have it install headless, and reboot properly afterward, it would be
worthwhile, but I could never get it to do that, and the kickstart file
has to be on a server somewhere. At the moment, we control everything
from VM, and creating instances is as simple as it can get.
-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:linux-...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of
Mark Pace
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 10:12 AM
To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU
Subject: Re: [LINUX-390] To kick or to clone ... that is the question
Unless your installation source is on a Hipersocket connection, then the
network time is near zilch.
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Hall, Ken (GTS) <ken_h...@ml.com>
wrote:
The small addition of the read time for DDR is nothing compared to the
time required to install the packages over the network. That's at
least
the same amount of reading, plus network time.
I agree about the problem of keeping multiple masters. We keep just
one
per version, and use a first-boot process to install additional
packages
via yum as needed, or let the admins install what they need manually.
It's still faster, by quite a lot. Unfortunately, I don't have time
today to run measurements, but our base system clone process takes
less
than 30 minutes from beginning to end.
All this said, we have been seriously considering going to a kickstart
based method, but my experience with it has not been encouraging.
Aside
from taking longer, it seems to be fairly fragile and requires more
manual effort. Our clone method consists of running a VM-based
dialog,
waiting for the copies to finish (run asynchronously in a service
machine), and then autologging the new guest.
-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:linux-...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of
Rob van der Heij
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 9:16 AM
To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU
Subject: Re: [LINUX-390] To kick or to clone ... that is the question
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Hall, Ken (GTS)<ken_h...@ml.com>
wrote:
How could it be faster?
Cloning involves simply copying the disks, that's one pass with DDR.
Copying a disk requires reading and writing. Formatting just requires
(short) writes. Depending on your configuration, you may not notice
the extra resource usage in the elapsed time.
But it's probably more whether you spend the time while you're waiting
for it. Once you get into the business of holding several different
golden masters to copy from, things get more complicated.
Back then we used a very bare minimum that was copied to the new root
disk, and the required additional packages were added on top of it.
That approach allows for a stock supply of copied root disks ready to
use.
-Rob
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handling of EC, and EC may be archived, supervised and produced in countries other than the
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