perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Mark Feit <>]

Paul Manomaitis - NOAA Affiliate writes:

 

1. PerfSONAR is best used in the downloadable CentOS download package, this will have the greatest level of testing and assumed stability? vs 

 

Whether you install from the ISO or start with a minimal CentOS, you’re largely running the same thing.  If you install the toolkit, that does a lot of the basic tweaking for you.

 

2. Are there any drawbacks to virtualization? Using VirtualBox or VMWorkstation running on a windows OS.  Or even running it as an ESXI guest?

 

The big drawbacks are handing control of the system over to something else and I/O throughput, which tends not to be wonderful on VMs.  Some of that can be mitigated by dedicating resources and doing things like PCI passthrough for the NICs.  Really, though, the only way to see whether a given setup will get the job done is to run it in the lab back-to-back with a machine whose performance you know.  All that said, there are a lot of registered perfSONAR instances running on VMs, and while I doubt they’re doing high-speed throughput, they’re just fine for most other things.

 

3. For bare metal, is there an optimized rack mount / non-rack mount minimal footprint compute solution? e.g. An intel NUC, since Raspi/Odroid with ARM isn't supported. -- A HW loadout which might be recommended ? Emphasizing 10G NIC capability.

Trying to balance remote management suite capabilities and size of footprint and cost.

 

If you’re after a box to do 10 Gb/s, Ed Colone at UMich is a big fan of the SuperMicro E300-8D.  It’s rackmountable, well-equipped and relatively inexpensive (not NUC/RPi cheap, but a lot of machine for the money).  He has a few notes on it here:  https://github.com/perfsonar/project/wiki/Small-form-factor-10GE-perfSONAR-testpoint.

 

--Mark