Virtual Server Performance

[Dorian Puerta]

Anyone have experience using VMWare ESX server? Anyone have experience with Virtualizing a Web Server? Does it have any performance impact?
Some decisions have been made toward using VMWare but I have this uneasy feeling about it.

What happened was we moved our web app to a new server after 7 years.
Un- knowingly the ColdFusion Setup on old server had a tweak to remove client data after a day, we didn't know about the tweak and coldfusion had a default setting of 90 days. What happened next is that the registry got too big after a week and started generating errors so we rebooted and couldn't get the server back up. We ended up turning our development environment into our production environment which was already virtualized. What my network engineer suggested was moving the production installation to a virtual server in case a situation should arise where the server became un-responsive again, in that case we could restore from backup with out too much work (his assumption).  The server that he is thinking about using was not planned to be virtualized originally so I don't know if it will be adequate. Here are the hardware
specs:

Dell PowerEdge 2950 Server
- Dual 2.66Ghz Dual Core Processors
- 4GB RAM
- 3x143GB 10K SAS Drives: RAID 5
- PERC5-I RAID Card
- Redundant Power Supply
- Windows 2003 Standard

The web server gets ~700k page views per month. I have already lived through the nightmare of working in environment that was limping along generating tons of random errors, I would not like to re-live that again.

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[Dave Watts]

> Anyone have experience using VMWare ESX
> server?

Yes.

> Anyone have experience with Virtualizing a Web
> Server?

Yes. Many of our clients run CF in ESX guests.

> Does it have any performance impact?

It certainly can. It could improve performance, or degrade it. There
are whole books written about sizing VM environments. Without knowing
how resources will be allocated to your VM, no one can give you a
specific answer.

> Un- knowingly the ColdFusion Setup on old server
> had a tweak to remove client data after a day, we
> didn't know about the tweak and coldfusion had a
> default setting of 90 days. What happened next is
> that the registry got too big after a week and started
> generating errors so we rebooted and couldn't get
> the server back up.

This has nothing to do with virtualized environments, of course. If
you don't manage CF properly, it will fail. You should not store
Client variables in the registry; that option is there for backward
compatibility with CF 2.

> What my network engineer suggested was moving
> the production installation to a virtual server in case
> a situation should arise where the server became un-
> responsive again, in that case we could restore from
> backup with out too much work (his assumption).

That's true enough; you can take a snapshot of an existing VM and
restore it very easily.

> The server that he is thinking about using was not
> planned to be virtualized originally so I don't know if
> it will be adequate. Here are the hardware specs ...

If you provide similar resources to the VM in question, it should
perform well enough. But you didn't provide any information about your
ESX environment, so no one can answer that with certainty.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information

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[Dorian Puerta]

>If you provide similar resources to the VM in question, it should
>perform well enough. But you didn't provide any information about your
>ESX environment, so no one can answer that with certainty.

What addition information should I provide? The Virtual Server environment here is relatively recent within the last 6 months. I only know that my co-worker intends to install ESX on the server listed in the previous post.

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[Dave Watts]

> > If you provide similar resources to the VM in question, it should
> > perform well enough. But you didn't provide any information about your
> > ESX environment, so no one can answer that with certainty.
>
> What addition information should I provide? The Virtual Server environment here is relatively
> recent within the last 6 months. I only know that my co-worker intends to install ESX on the
> server listed in the previous post.

I misread your post, then. I assumed that the hardware specs you
listed were for the existing non-virtualized CF server. Still, though,
you'd need to specify how many other VMs will run on the same machine,
how resources will be allocated across VMs, and the original hardware
specifications for the non-virtualized CF server.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!

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[Matthew R. Learn]

By reading the email, I would guess that the original poster intends to run
only VM Server on the main OS with a single VM running the CF web server in
it.  So the specs of the VM would be pretty close to that of the host
server, minus over head for the host OS.  

>From the sense of "lived through the nightmare of working in environment
that was limping along generating tons of random errors", use a VM would not
add any additional errors, as far as CF would know, it would be like any
other server.  Assuming that the VM has enough resources, there is little
downside to working this way, with the exception of now needing to upgrade
to OS's when patches are released.  

I work with clients who have all sorts of different setups, including a
client that is running everything on VM's.  In this case, the hardware
running the VM is very beefy, and there are many VM's on the server, the
advantage of this is that if the CM hosting ColdFusion has a spike in
traffic, it can get most of the processing power of the main host machine.
With the 700k page views a month, you are talking about 1000 page views an
hour, unless each page view is doing a lot of work, there should be no
problems with the hardware you have selected.  

And, I agree with the other poster, do not use the registry for your client
variables, it is just a bad idea!  

-Matthew R. Learn


-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Watts [mailto:dwatts@...]
Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2009 5:22 PM
To: cf-server
Subject: Re: Virtual Server Performance


> > If you provide similar resources to the VM in question, it should
> > perform well enough. But you didn't provide any information about your
> > ESX environment, so no one can answer that with certainty.
>
> What addition information should I provide? The Virtual Server environment
here is relatively
> recent within the last 6 months. I only know that my co-worker intends to
install ESX on the
> server listed in the previous post.

I misread your post, then. I assumed that the hardware specs you
listed were for the existing non-virtualized CF server. Still, though,
you'd need to specify how many other VMs will run on the same machine,
how resources will be allocated across VMs, and the original hardware
specifications for the non-virtualized CF server.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!



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[Dave Watts]

> By reading the email, I would guess that the original poster intends to run
> only VM Server on the main OS with a single VM running the CF web server in
> it.  So the specs of the VM would be pretty close to that of the host
> server, minus over head for the host OS.

I thought that might be a possibility, but didn't want to infer it
from the email. That said, if this is how you're planning to use
VMware ESX, it's a waste of time and money.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information

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[Mark Ireland-2]

Please elaborate. Why do you say its a waste of time and money?

> Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 17:32:55 -0400
> Subject: Re: Virtual Server Performance
> From: dwatts@...
> To: cf-server@...
>
>
> > By reading the email, I would guess that the original poster intends to run
> > only VM Server on the main OS with a single VM running the CF web server in
> > it.  So the specs of the VM would be pretty close to that of the host
> > server, minus over head for the host OS.
>
> I thought that might be a possibility, but didn't want to infer it
> from the email. That said, if this is how you're planning to use
> VMware ESX, it's a waste of time and money.
>
> Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
> http://www.figleaf.com/
>
> Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
> instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
> Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
> Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information
>
>

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[Dave Watts]

> Please elaborate. Why do you say its a waste of time and money?

Running VMware allows you to share physical hardware across virtual
machines. If you just have one VM, you might as well just install on
the physical hardware in the first place. There's a non-negligible
performance overhead with virtualization.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!

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[Mark Ireland-2]

So, in the case of Coldfusion, having three identical VMs behind a loadbalancer (that each share the database and fileserver codebase etc, but not RAM)

there is an advantage?

> Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:15:48 -0400
> Subject: Re: Virtual Server Performance
> From: dwatts@...
> To: cf-server@...
>
>
> > Please elaborate. Why do you say its a waste of time and money?
>
> Running VMware allows you to share physical hardware across virtual
> machines. If you just have one VM, you might as well just install on
> the physical hardware in the first place. There's a non-negligible
> performance overhead with virtualization.
>
> Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
> http://www.figleaf.com/
>
> Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
> instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
> Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
> Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!
>
>

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[James Holmes-3]

Does the DB support clustering?

mxAjax / CFAjax docs and other useful articles:
http://www.bifrost.com.au/blog/

2009/4/14 Mark Ireland <markincuba@...>:
>
> So, in the case of Coldfusion, having three identical VMs behind a loadbalancer (that each share the database and fileserver codebase etc, but not RAM)
>
> there is an advantage?

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[Dave Watts]

> So, in the case of Coldfusion, having three identical VMs behind a loadbalancer (that each
> share the database and fileserver codebase etc, but not RAM)
>
> there is an advantage?

Sure. You have fault tolerance, and you could easily increase the
number of VMs as necessary, as long as you have the resources to do
so.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!

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[Bob Muzzy]

Dave, If I may ask a tangential question, do you have a recommended
loadbalancer for CF?  I've looked at some and the price range is huge.
I'm not sure I need anything but sticky sessions, and perhaps host
header redirection as regard features.

Thanks,

Bob Muzzy

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Watts [mailto:dwatts@...]
Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 7:00 AM
To: cf-server
Subject: Re: Virtual Server Performance


> So, in the case of Coldfusion, having three identical VMs behind a
loadbalancer (that each
> share the database and fileserver codebase etc, but not RAM)
>
> there is an advantage?

Sure. You have fault tolerance, and you could easily increase the
number of VMs as necessary, as long as you have the resources to do
so.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!



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[Dave Watts]

> Dave, If I may ask a tangential question, do you have a recommended
> loadbalancer for CF?  I've looked at some and the price range is huge.
> I'm not sure I need anything but sticky sessions, and perhaps host
> header redirection as regard features.

Not really. Any load balancer will do. I'm no expert on them, either.
You can buy used ones, too, and those often work well enough if you're
looking for the cheapest solution. I think Radware products are
comparatively inexpensive, too, and those have worked for some of our
clients.

If you're using SSL/TLS, the ability to host certificates on the load
balancer can improve performance, so I'd get one that supports that. I
think most of them do, though.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
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[Mark Ireland-2]

We use Oracle so I assume it could (but we dont)

We can get Coldfusion clusters working on the one server but we have been unable to get three seperate

coldfusion servers to work in the same cluster.

For us the immediate advantage is getting away from sharing RAM with other (non CF) java apps.

> Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:08:53 +0800
> Subject: Re: Virtual Server Performance
> From: james.holmes@...
> To: cf-server@...
>
>
> Does the DB support clustering?
>
> mxAjax / CFAjax docs and other useful articles:
> http://www.bifrost.com.au/blog/
>
> 2009/4/14 Mark Ireland <markincuba@...>:
> >
> > So, in the case of Coldfusion, having three identical VMs behind a loadbalancer (that each share the database and fileserver codebase etc, but not RAM)
> >
> > there is an advantage?
>
>

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[Matthew R. Learn]

I have read about some of the load balancing features of Cold Fusion, has
anyone used the built in features of CF 8 (this might only be in the
Enterprise version).  

Along those lines, if someone has gotten the built in CF load balancing
working, I was wondering if you would be able to run two CF Servers on the
same machine configured for load balancing?  Let me state where I am coming
from with this question, I have a client where I keep getting random lockups
in the system, where CF becomes completely unresponsive.  I have been trying
to track this down with no luck, but I was reading about the Load balancing
on CF 8 and I was wondering if I could run two CF servers on one machine so
that if one locks up, all the other requests would get forwarded to the
other CF server on the same machine.  

Right now, CF is the only thing running on the server, and there are plenty
of resources left (even during a lock up, processor and memory usage are not
high) so I was thinking about ways to more fully utilize the machine.  (And
before you ask, yes I did increase the Java Heap Size, and when it locks up,
I am looking at the Java Heap, and it can be below 400mb).  

-Matthew R. Learn


-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Muzzy [mailto:bob.muzzy@...]
Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 11:07 AM
To: cf-server
Subject: RE: Virtual Server Performance


Dave, If I may ask a tangential question, do you have a recommended
loadbalancer for CF?  I've looked at some and the price range is huge.
I'm not sure I need anything but sticky sessions, and perhaps host
header redirection as regard features.

Thanks,

Bob Muzzy

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Watts [mailto:dwatts@...]
Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 7:00 AM
To: cf-server
Subject: Re: Virtual Server Performance


> So, in the case of Coldfusion, having three identical VMs behind a
loadbalancer (that each
> share the database and fileserver codebase etc, but not RAM)
>
> there is an advantage?

Sure. You have fault tolerance, and you could easily increase the
number of VMs as necessary, as long as you have the resources to do
so.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!





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[James Holmes-3]

Yes, it's part of Enterprise. The load balancing features work fine,
although most people ignore the session replication because it's more
trouble than it's worth.

You can run two instances of multiserver in a cluster on the same
machine and get the benefits you are after. If you run them on
separate machines, you also get the benefits of extra CPU power and
hardware redundancy.

mxAjax / CFAjax docs and other useful articles:
http://www.bifrost.com.au/blog/



2009/4/16 Matthew Learn <matthew@...>:

>
> I have read about some of the load balancing features of Cold Fusion, has
> anyone used the built in features of CF 8 (this might only be in the
> Enterprise version).
>
> Along those lines, if someone has gotten the built in CF load balancing
> working, I was wondering if you would be able to run two CF Servers on the
> same machine configured for load balancing?  Let me state where I am coming
> from with this question, I have a client where I keep getting random lockups
> in the system, where CF becomes completely unresponsive.  I have been trying
> to track this down with no luck, but I was reading about the Load balancing
> on CF 8 and I was wondering if I could run two CF servers on one machine so
> that if one locks up, all the other requests would get forwarded to the
> other CF server on the same machine.
>
> Right now, CF is the only thing running on the server, and there are plenty
> of resources left (even during a lock up, processor and memory usage are not
> high) so I was thinking about ways to more fully utilize the machine.  (And
> before you ask, yes I did increase the Java Heap Size, and when it locks up,
> I am looking at the Java Heap, and it can be below 400mb).
>
> -Matthew R. Learn
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Muzzy [mailto:bob.muzzy@...]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 11:07 AM
> To: cf-server
> Subject: RE: Virtual Server Performance
>
>
> Dave, If I may ask a tangential question, do you have a recommended
> loadbalancer for CF?  I've looked at some and the price range is huge.
> I'm not sure I need anything but sticky sessions, and perhaps host
> header redirection as regard features.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bob Muzzy
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Watts [mailto:dwatts@...]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 7:00 AM
> To: cf-server
> Subject: Re: Virtual Server Performance
>
>
>> So, in the case of Coldfusion, having three identical VMs behind a
> loadbalancer (that each
>> share the database and fileserver codebase etc, but not RAM)
>>
>> there is an advantage?
>
> Sure. You have fault tolerance, and you could easily increase the
> number of VMs as necessary, as long as you have the resources to do
> so.
>
> Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
> http://www.figleaf.com/
>
> Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
> instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
> Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
> Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!
>
>
>
>
>
>

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[Matthew R. Learn]

I just wanted to add something into this discussion.  I work with a client,
where all their systems are on VM's on some major hardware (yes I know this
is how VM's tend to work best).  We  recently had a system that died after
the OS rebooted, the OS would not come back up.  Because we had numerous VM
backups, we could restore a previous VM and be back up right away instead of
having to wait to rebuild a system.  

With 1TB drives selling for around $100, it is easy to use a VM with a
backup to a slow/large 1TB drive so that if something does happen, you can
be back up in a matter of minutes instead of hours.  For a setup like this,
I would suggest a 10GB system partition with the OS and ColdFusion installed
on it.  All the data on a separate D drive.  If something happens to the
10GB system partition in the VM, you ditch that and bring up a backup from a
previous version and you are back up and running.  By having all the CFM
files on the D drive, the C drive, with the OS and CF, only has some system
settings that probably do not change very often.  And with backing up the
10GB VM to the external 1TB drive, you could have 100 VM backups, which
ended up being good for us, because we had to go back two weeks before we
found a VM that did not have the issue that caused the system not to come up
(there seemed to have been some sort of virus or update that got applied in
that time which did not take effect until the machine restarted)

Yes, all of this does add an extra layer of complexity and you end up
wasting some resources, but if you compare that with the cost of doing some
hardware based fault tolerance (having a second machine ready to go), this
seems like an easier and less expensive way to go.  

Like every other decision with computers, it is going to be a tradeoff
between cost and performance.  

-Matthew R. Learn

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Watts [mailto:dwatts@...]
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 10:16 PM
To: cf-server
Subject: Re: Virtual Server Performance


> Please elaborate. Why do you say its a waste of time and money?

Running VMware allows you to share physical hardware across virtual
machines. If you just have one VM, you might as well just install on
the physical hardware in the first place. There's a non-negligible
performance overhead with virtualization.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!



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