UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

now, i have been reading alot of books about this load balancing thing. when looking at the output of iostat and one determines that the disks do not have roughly equivalent utilization rate, books i've read mentions balancing the loads so the loads are spread evenly across the disks.

Now, i really hate this as at least, these damn books should explain in plain steps how to accomplish this balancing concept. instead they go on assuming their readers knows what the hell is going on.

The help I need from you guys is for you to tell me what i'm supposed to do when "load balancing". i mean, what do i do?? please dont give sumed up answers. i would appreciate if you can tell me in details. it can't be that complicated. Just go straight to the main points and I will fill in the rest cuz I not new to Unix.

(remember, i have no clue about this load balancing so please include in your answers any little information that u feel is important)

thank you

Could you please tell us what kind of unix you are running?

Solaris, Hp-ux ?

Please run: uname -a
and post the output . It will tell what OS you are running.
And then we can point at some software and tricks to help you out.

/Peter

am running sunOS 5.8, and 8
also Linux RedHat 8.0

Sun has a product called Disk Suite for solaris 8 witch lets you make software raids and that is a way of even the load across disks and controllers. It will also improve system stability if used
for mirroring disks.

check it out on www.sun.com. Its free and included in the solaris 8 distro.

Linux has a product that does the same thing dont remember the name maybe someone can help out ?

Hope thats what you were after? You could also try to split up software across machines lets say one server runs the database and one runs the application... Load balancing is a huge area so please if you need any more specific help please just ask!

/Peter

heres a specific question:

I type iostat 5 5 or something like that. from the output of this command I noticed that a particular disk is being hit real hard with information. now, this is obviously not GOOD. now, what do I do?? spread the hits across all the cpus on the system so one particular cpu doesn't get hit to death or to the point of crashing, right??

HOW DO I DO THAT????

Do you mean CPU ur DISK?

anyway if you mean disk

you could use disk suite as i said


or if you know that for example your ftp site is on /ftp/pub/
and /ftp is mounted on one disk you could try split the load by adding more disks and mount specific subdirectorys to the diffrent disks. lets say

/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s1 /ftp/pub/lots_of_files/
/dev/dsk/c1t3d0s1 /ftp/pub/more_files/

and so on..

If you can tell me what kind of software you are running i may be able to help you out better.. If you know could you please post what kind of hardware you are running? big iron small iron?

/peter

possably the reason the book does not include a how-to is because it is written for every os.

The books i have read assume:
1) you dont know what to look for
2) you know how to implament various methods

google groups has always turned up a wealth of information, at least a referance to a command or something so i can start my "man page" hunt.

Solairs:
to implament diskload balancing you can use "metatool" for the gui or "metainit" for the command line.