Testbed Update Plan

Planning the update of the middleware/development test bed

The upgrade has taken place; the remaining information of this page is to be merged into Agile testbed.

Migration to a cloud infrastructure

Previous testbed cloud experiences are reported here.

Currently, using plain libvirt seems to fit most of our needs.

Installing Debian on blade 13 and 14 with Fiber Channel

This is a quick note to record a recent quirk. Although FC support on Debian works fine, using the multipath-tools-boot package is a bit tricky. It will update the initrd to include the multipath libraries and tools, to make it available at boot time.

This happened on blade-13; on reboot it was unable to mount the root partition (The message was 'device or resource busy') because the device mapper had somehow taken hold of the SCSI disk. By changing the root=UUID=xxxx stanza in the GRUB menu to root=/dev/dm-2 (this was guess-work) I managed to boot the system. There were probably several remedies to resolve the issue:

1. rerun update-grub. This should replace the UUID= with a link to /dev/mapper/xxxx-part1
2. blacklist the disk in the device mapper (and running mkinitramfs)
3. remove the multipath-tools-boot package altogether.

I opted for blacklisting; this is what's in /etc/multipath.conf:

blacklist {
 wwid 3600508e000000000d6c6de44c0416105
}

A bonnie test of a VM with disk on local disk vs. a VM with disk on FC:

• lofarwn.testbed had its disk locally

Version 1.03e       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
lofarwn          4G 20869  35 30172   5 23198   6 45957  85 510971  84 +++++ +++
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16 16759  99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ 16810 100 +++++ +++ +++++ +++
lofarwn,4G,20869,35,30172,5,23198,6,45957,85,510971,84,+++++,+++,16,16759,99,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,16810,100,+++++,+++,+++++,+++

• ige-cert.testbed has disk on LVM via FC.

Version 1.03e       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
ige-cert         4G 53384  96 216611  37 102283  24 51060  95 689474  79 +++++ +++
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16 12676 100 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ 12761  99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++
ige-cert,4G,53384,96,216611,37,102283,24,51060,95,689474,79,+++++,+++,16,12676,100,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,12761,99,+++++,+++,+++++,+++