Your Ignite Servers...

[SM_3]

Your Ignite Servers:

1) Do you only use them for Ignite-UX?
2) How many GBs do you use to run your Ignite Servers?

We'll be replacing our old HP-UX system soon. Given the above questions I just want to know what you do out there.

Thanks

[Pete Randall]

1) No, that would be a waste.

2) With todays larger drive sizes, your new server will probably come with a 36GB internal disk. Of that 36GB, 10GB or so should be plenty for your root file system, and the rest is more than adequate for your Ignite images.


Pete

[RolandH]

Our ignite server is using 250 MB.

about 100MB for the binaries and
150MB for configuration data.

The images for the workstations and the server install are placed outsite the ignite server. Every image is about 900MB.

So all together is about 2.1GB.

And no we are using this system not only for ignite. Because we haven't so much installations. 5-15 a month. every installtion is 30 minutes each. So our Ignite system is a J-Class ws and is used also a ws for one admin of us. No proble for that system.

HTH
Roland

[SM_3]

What else do you use your Ignite severs for?

would the use include a DB production server???

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi,

We use a admin system for ignite and syslog etc. As Pete said 10 GB is enough.

Robert-Jan.

[Pete Randall]

If your production DB server has "off-hours" where there isn't a lot of usage and you could schedule your Ignite sessions during those off-hours, it would be fine. Otherwise I would think you might run into I/O contention - how much contention would depend on the DB load, the Ignite load, etc.


Pete

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

I would not use the Ignite server for production database work. While the load on the server is minimal, it will load the LAN and if multiple images are needed, the load could be a problem. Similarly, creating patch depots and additional images might be a bit much. Database servers always seems to become a lot more important (and overloaded) after a while. I would add NTP server capability, bootp/DHCP services, even DNS or secondary DNS services. Other services might be a POP3 or IMAP mail server, Central Web Console services, centralized system inventory monitor. ftp depository, CDROM server (for applications).

[Steven E. Protter]

Our Ignite Server doubles as a sandboxs, sysadmin test area.

There are non-production installs of all of our software, including oracle databse, because we used it to develop install methodology and then took a golden image of the machine.

Its a rp5450 machine that does NO production work. It came with a pair of 73 GB drives and all the space not needed for the boot partition is part of /images where we keep the golden images. We also keep make_net_recovery images on it.

Total space devoted to Ignite Images: 95 GB.

SEP

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi SM,

Our Ignite servers double as our depot servers. We have separate servers for separate locations to cut down WAN traffic.
Since we maintain rather large depots & many images we have ~75GB storage for these servers. And since the loads are never that high we can get away with using K-class boxes.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
It depends on how may clients you want to backup and the numver of versions you want to save. Estimate 1 GB/client and version. Mirrored disk is a good idea.
You may also use it as swdepot server (for patches, appliactions and such) and other mon-critical purposes (for example NIS-Slave and NTP-server).

[GK_5]

No. We have Ignite running on each server and each server is used to do it's own Ignite backup for recovery purpose.

-GK-

[Elli Wang]

We do have dedicated Ignite servers, since we build a lot of servers. Using a faster server can cut down the building time. After moving out Ignite server from A180 to A400, we save around 10 to 15 minutes on each 11 or 11i builds. Space is also a big concern. We just plan to replace 32GB disks with 72GB ones. YMMV.

[John Payne_2]

I use my Ignite Server for Ignite images as a software depot machine. I have the 2 36GB internal disks mirrored, and have plenty of space to maintain images. (I do little make_recovery, we try to keep all machines on same image, will just reinstall if we ever need to.) /var/opt/ignite/archives is a 10GB filesystem, which I never fill. (I can hold about 12-14 images there. Older Ignite images will be on tape backup if needed...)

I have 50 HPUX machines that we maintain with this server. The reasoning behind these being the only things used on this machine is that this is really what we need if we have to rebuild. (Disaster Recovery, of a sorts.) Isolating it protects it from anything else.

Have 1 place for all SD bundles makes Firewall rules easier for me also.

Hope it helps

John

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

At home, the Ignite server also is the backup master node and software depot SD.
It's a low number of clients only, and I use 15GB of a RAID5 array for
Ignite images,
Ignite software and
ntbackup client Backups.
The system itself is being backuped to tape. I chose an external array because in the worst case I'd be able to take it and hook it onto another hp-ux box.

At work, the Ignite Server is on a L3000 cluster system which also keeps the software depot.

For space calculation we take num_clients*2GB.

The performance hit of saving ignite images is extremely low, saving 5 clients at a time results in ~10% overall cpu load.

The only problem in a cluster failover is the hanging tcp/nfs connections which e.g. mean You'd have to restart ongoing Ignite Installs or such.

Usually the only point You want to keep an eye on doing additional local backups of the ignite server. You'll need them as soon as You find out the backups are unavailable until You recovered the backup server from ignite :)