IBM Director 5.10.2 questions / performance

[jaapengel79]

Hi,

For our serverfarm (mainly IBM xSeries / Windows based) we've been using IBM Director 3.1x in the past.

We upgraded to IBM Director 4.12 when W2k was introduced and had nothing but trouble with that. Then, we upgraded the Director Server to 4.22 and some agents as well.

We still experience loads of problems, WMI Errors on the managed servers for instance, not being able to add another server to the Director Server without having to restart the Director Server process, all kinds of problems really.

Anyway, IBM now advised us to upgrade to 5.10.x (what a surprise) and I personally thought it might be a wise idea to think about a Linux server and running the Console on another (Windows based) server and use a sturdier database.

The sandbox environment for this is as follows:

1) Director 5.10.2 Server on an xSeries 342 with SuSE Linux Enterprise 9
2) PostgreSQL database which came with SuSE 9 on the same server as the Director Server on a RAID-5 array (as opposed to everything on 1 (mirrored) disk as it is now)
3) Director 5.10.2 Console on a Netfinity 5000 running Windows 2003 (I know...)
4) Director 5.10.2 Client on the same Netfinity 5000.

I've tried searching the net but I can't find much (or anything really) relating to increased performance in the setup that I'm about to suggest to the company.

Anyone have any experience with the setup I have in mind, or better yet, has performance numbers/figures that this hopefully will bring?

Also I'm getting bluescreens right after startup on the Netfinity 5000 when I install the IBM ServeRAID Agent. Possibly because it's a 3H or 3L adapter with Windows 2003 default drivers, bios 7.10.18 and firmware 7.00.something ... ??? IBM asked me to mail the DSA output but even that gives me BSOD's running it with or without the ServeRAID agent.

 

[JohnE66]

We have 5.10.1 on Windows. Not perfect but better then 4.x. My recommendation if you stay on Windows is to do a fresh install and don't upgrade. We upgraded, had problems and reinstalled. Still some problems, but it works.

 

[jaapengel79]

Thanks John .. considering the fact you still have some problems (which I'd love to hear all about, maybe it will be of use to us since 'problems with Director' is the biggest issue) would you still recommend Windows over, for instance, Linux? For instance, do you have experience with the Linux setup?

Also I'd like to know what kind of situation you used; how many clients for example (we have about ooooh 150?) on what kind of database (Oracle, SQL, the built-in Jet engine?)

 

[JohnE66]

We have just downloaded 5.10.3 and will try an upgrade with that.

We have issues with the Director Service crashing. We have a call logged with IBM but we haven't made any progress yet.

When Director is starting it sends out all the alerts to say it can see everything. It didn't used to do that and I am sure that there must be a setting to stop it but haven't found it yet. It means we need to start the SMTP service manually at least 10 mins after a restart of the server or service.

The PegasusAdapterProvider on the servers is keeping file handles open and using up the kernel non paged memory....not good.

I sure there are others, but they are the key ones I am involved in.

No experience with Linux...sorry. I would be interested to know if you do go for Linux whether it is more stable.

We have 100+ Blade Servers and a few rack mounts. We use SQL 2000. For the crashing IBM advised us to try the native Apache database. We did, but it still crashed so we went back to SQL.

 

[jaapengel79]

Hi again,

Thanks for the update; I'd say IBM will suggest you upgrade to 5.10.4 ... but what can you do -- keep upgrading until they're satisfied?

The current status of my sandbox environment is that I've got a SuSE Enterprise 9 server running on an IBM xSeries 342 machine, with Director Server 5.10.3, a PostgreSQL database, a single Windows 2000 client and a Windows 2003 machine with the Console on it.

We also use System Availability, Electronic Service, and the ServeRAID manager.

All of the plugins currently work, but since it's just a tiny environment there's not much to say about it just yet.. until our customer approves the whole project this will have to stay 'on hold' .. after that there's not much else to be done except tune the server for the production network and install some other thingiemajigs like a virusscanner, performance monitoring etc.

For now all I can see is that the Linux server eats quite a bit of memory (ps -ef | grep ibm gives me 327 processes running!) out of the 1Gb that we have, about 280 Mb is free after starting the database and Director.

I'll keep you posted on the proceedings; for now it looks quite stable.

 

[jaapengel79]

ow, correction: we run Director 5.10.2 .. not 3..

 

[CoreyWilson]

In my opinion IBM Director is one of the most unreliable cumbersome monitoring programs out there. Imho the only thing it has going for it is the fact thats it free

 

[jaapengel79]

Past experiences would force me to agree with you, Corey however, our customer runs IBM servers, therefore their philosophy is that the 'best' monitoring software would be IBM's own product. For software monitoring we -suprise!- use Tivoli Enterprise Console.

 

[xxzab]

I am using 5.10.3 on a windows system with the Apache database to monitoring the hardware of my systems using director agent v3.1. And it seems to be stable. I have needed to restart the director service like twice because it went down but other then that no problems.

Eric
Whirlpool Corp.