Environment
Novell GroupWise 2014
Novell Open Enterprise Server 11 (OES 11) Linux Support Pack 2
Situation
Customer is experiencing slow performance with Groupwise post office.
Customer is running in a vmware virtualized environment.
Virtual machine is on a shared LUN
PostOffice is stored on /media/nss/MAIL
Customer is running Symantec and Microsoft Anti-virus scanners.
TSATEST effective MB/min was 60-100, Avg. Open Time, 100-200us, Avg Close Time, 100-200us Avg. Read Time was 4700us
Customer is running in a vmware virtualized environment.
Virtual machine is on a shared LUN
PostOffice is stored on /media/nss/MAIL
Customer is running Symantec and Microsoft Anti-virus scanners.
TSATEST effective MB/min was 60-100, Avg. Open Time, 100-200us, Avg Close Time, 100-200us Avg. Read Time was 4700us
Resolution
Customer moved LUN to faster storage.
TSATEST effective MB/min improved to 2000+ Avg. Open Time, 000us, Avg Close Time, 000us Avg. Read Time was 1400us
TSATEST effective MB/min improved to 2000+ Avg. Open Time, 000us, Avg Close Time, 000us Avg. Read Time was 1400us
Cause
GroupWise is I/O intensive. It requires the ability to read and write many small files with out any delays. Faster hardware was need to meet the needs of GroupWise.
Additional Information
Best Practices:
- 1 LUN per Virtual Machine
- When a LUN is share between multiple VM's, I/O will be compromised.
- Remove snapshots
- When running in VMware environment, change SLES kernel scheduler to noop
- Exclude virus scanning from the following:
- ._NETWARE
- /_admin
- /admin
- /media/nss/MAIL*
*where MAIL is then name of the nss pool hosting the post office files. - Disable the virus scanner if i/o performance is slow as a troubleshooting tool.
- When using NSS, there may be a small performance increase with the following nsscon commands:
- nss /NoATime=MAIL*
- nss /ReadAheadBlks=MAIL*:2
*where MAIL is then name of the nss pool hosting the post office files.