[Xymon] Xymon performance scaling problems for Solaris zones?

[Norbert Kriegenburg]

David,

because Solaris zones shares the same filesystem we usually do all this
disk performance tests only at the global zone.
It is not useful (and will create a lot of additional IO traffic) to test
the same disk group from every zone and global, because the results will be
the same of course, and then you have your observed  overhead.

Also the disk usage is only checked at the global zone to avoid double
alerts (of course you can disable all zone filesystem usage checks at
global zone and activate the local zone checks at every zone individually,
but that is a lot of more work to do, and does not work instantly if you
create new zones).

Also all health checks and the like we do only at global zone...

Norbert



From:	"Mills, David (IS)" <David.Mills at ngc.com>
To:	"xymon at xymon.com" <xymon at xymon.com>
Date:	06/24/2014 07:37 PM
Subject:	[Xymon] Xymon performance scaling problems for Solaris zones?
Sent by:	"Xymon" <xymon-bounces at xymon.com>



Hi, all...

We've been running Xymon (4.3.3 -- yes, old, old, old...) very successfully
for the last several years in our environment, but have run into a
performance snag recently.

We run Xymon on all our Solaris zones -- up to 10 zones + the global zone,
at a time. Recently we've started configuring new Oracle LDOMS (64 x SPARC
T5-8 processors / LDOM) with > 20 Solaris zones / LDOM and we're seeing
that after about 10 zones, Xymon starts to hog CPU in a non-linear way,
making the zones unusable.

Specifically, it's not any of the "Xymon" daemons, but it's all the
concurrent "vmstat" and "iostats" that are racking up the CPU cycles.

We understand we have several options available including instantiating
processor sets and pools, ulimits, etc, but we wanted to know if:

a) Anyone else has had to navigate this problem with such a large number of
concurrent *stat commands

b) Is it possible / advisable to monitor zones via Xymon using only a
single instance of Xymon running in the global zone, or possibly a
representative local zone?

The LDOMs all run Solaris 11, FWIW.

TIA for any tips!

david

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
David Mills
Systems Administrator
Northrop Grumman
(512) 873-6665_______________________________________________
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