Managing Windows/NT Servers in a Wan/LAN Environment Stan Dylnicki Royal Bank Financial Group CMG Orlando December 13, 2000 (416)
Agenda Environment Background Issues Methodology Current Status Tools Future
Bank Environment Largest Bank in Canada 49,000 employees 2,000 IT employees 1,600 branches
Bank Environment 4 Processing Centres across Canada 3 Campus environments Districts & Service Delivery Business Banking Centres Branches
PC/LAN Environment 30,000 Windows NT 10,000 Windows/95, DOS, OS/2, PCs 2,000 Windows NT servers 100 OS/2 servers Head Office, Branch, Business Banking
Application Environment Most applications ports from DOS & OS/2 New applications developed in Visual Basic Client data is on mainframes Majority of applications are bought solutions & modified for multi-tier
Background My background is mainframe Lessons learned from OS/2 deployment Proactive branch support Move from OS/2 to NT
Issues Large number of servers & locations Diverse types of servers Many configurations & hardware Performance data hard to get Applications written for functionality (not necessarily for performance) Bought solutions don’t always scale across platforms Systems Management emerging
More Issues How to report on large number of servers How to collect enough information without overloading network Explosive growth of memory and disk on desktops Explosive growth of File servers disk space Explosive growth of Internet usage
Methodology Use alert tool for performance monitoring Don’t collect everything Size servers & desktops for life of the box Manage & report by exception Provide tools to users so they can diagnose their own problems Provide limited set of reports
Current Status All NT images include a performance agent Classify servers by type Provide exception reports to area managers Pilot disk quota monitoring Provide web access for management reporting Benchmark hardware to understand capacity limits
Tools Tivoli alert agent – performance & availability NTSMF collectors SAS ITSV repository Web reporting Desktop Memory Monitor Benchmarks: Iometer, Netbench, Sysbench, SYSMARK32
NTSMF & SAS ITSV Data Flow NTSMF
SAS ITSV Environment Repository & IIS –Netfinity 5500 Server 2 Pentium II 450 cpus 512 MB RAM Raid-5 (9 GB X 6) FTP Server (shared) –Dell 6100 Server 4 Pentium Pro cpus 512 MB RAM Raid-5 (9GB X 6)
SAS ITSV Processing Statistics
SAS ITSV Processing by Database
SAS ITSV Server Counts
Web Reporting System
Web Reporting using Excel
Future Encourage application developers to use performance tools SAN solutions Clustering & Win2000 Datacentre NTSMF on selected desktops Measure transactions & response time
Summary & Lessons Learned Avoid writing your own tools Server naming conventions important Administration required and not trivial Data loss from sites inevitable Randomize FTP transmissions