Hi.
My name is Michael Homa and I'm a system programmer at the University of
Illinois at Chicago. We have a single 740 which we use to contain
university and department web pages.
We have six Novell servers that we use to service PC machines in our
student labs. The servers contain home space and applications. We are
considering replacing the servers with two or more netapps (we'd use the
740 and buy one or more additional machines - number of and model type
are still in doubt). We'd put the home directories and applications on
the netapp and let users access them via shares. We estimate that we would
have approximately 3,000 sessions with as yet an undetermined number of
both shares and open files. Of the 3,000, we don't have an estimates how
many of these sessions will be active. (Since inactive sessions don't
appear to be swapped to disk, the number of inactive sessions doesn't
really matter.) The netapp folks send us the following information
regarding models 740 and 820 (the two models we're considering):
740 820
----- ---
RAM 512MB 1GB
Max Users/Sessions 7,200 16,000
Max Shares 14,400 32,000
Max Open Files 144,000 320,000
Max Locked Files 160,384 352,768
num_64mb 8 16
The formulas that they use are as follows:
740: maxusers = ((num_64mb - 2) * 1000) + 1200
820: maxusers = ((num_64mb - 3) * 1000) + 3000
maxshares = 2 * maxusers
maxopenfiles = 20 maxusers
maxlockedfiles = maxopenfiles + (num_64mb * 2048)
The formulas gives us an indication of what is permitted. But, they don't
give us an sense of performance with such large numbers. Has anybody else
tried to hang so many users off one or more netapps? If so, what kind of
performance did your users see? The Netappliance folks haven't exactly
overwhelmed us with the names of sites doing something similar on such
a large scale. I'd appreciate any feedback. Thanks.
Michael Homa
Academic Computing and Communication Center
University of Illinois at Chicago
email: mhoma(a)uic.edu