The current machine is a desktop-class 2004-vintage Dell Optiplex GX280
3.6Ghz processor, 512MB memory, 80gig SATA hard drive.  Host and guest
o/s are both Windows Server 2003, with VMware Server.  The former home
of the LISTSERV(tm) system dated back to when 384MB memory on a 700Mhz
processor was new-and-wonderful, overall performance of the service
after this migration is significantly better - even though the current
configuration is hardly ideal for the setup (more memory would be really
really nice).  The file collection representing the guest machine
occupies about 20gig of disk space (the old machine had a 20gig drive).

List workload is fairly light, compared to many others; about 150
lists, largest busy list is about 1,100 subscribers (one has over 30K
subscribers but very low activity).  Over the course of about 3 months,
average traffic through LSMTP(tm) (running in the guest) is 10,800
messages per day.  I haven't ever figured out how to get daily stats
directly out of LISTSERV in any easy simple way into a text file I can
browse through and cut/paste from, but all the traffic reported below is
only list-related activity.

Some LSMTP (max 40 outbound threads) stats for a day when the BIG list
had activity (on the OLD system):
---------- SF90M.0216
Total: 69,384 deliveries
Highest sustained delivery rate for 1 minute:    20.2/sec at 16:13
Highest sustained delivery rate for 5 minutes:   17.6/sec at
17:23-17:27
Highest traffic in a one-hour period:          41,774 deliveries
(16:45-17:44)

and a few for the new (virtualized) system - this comparison is not
quite fair (the BIG list has had no traffic since migration) but does
show improvements; the five-minute and one-hour rates are not as high
because the new system has not had sufficient burst traffic; the
one-minute rate shows significant improvement over the old machine:
---------- SF90M.0302
Total: 14,100 deliveries
Highest sustained delivery rate for 1 minute:    39.4/sec at 11:37
Highest sustained delivery rate for 5 minutes:   15.3/sec at
11:36-11:40
Highest traffic in a one-hour period:           5,850 deliveries
(10:46-11:45)

---------- SF90M.0322
Total: 13,978 deliveries
Highest sustained delivery rate for 1 minute:    41.2/sec at 14:31
Highest sustained delivery rate for 5 minutes:   14.7/sec at
14:30-14:34
Highest traffic in a one-hour period:           6,054 deliveries
(14:31-15:30)

---------- SF90M.0416
Total: 27,299 deliveries
Highest sustained delivery rate for 1 minute:    31.3/sec at 13:36
Highest sustained delivery rate for 5 minutes:   13.4/sec at
13:31-13:35
Highest traffic in a one-hour period:          12,070 deliveries
(13:06-14:05)

For the work that LISTSERV and LSMTP do, it doesn't really take snazzy
hardware to deliver impressive performance, generally speaking.




>>> [log in to unmask] 5/7/2007 10:56:43 AM >>>
Kevin Parris wrote:
> I used the VMware Converter to generate a guest machine from the
> physical system.  The process went exactly as expected (if you're
> already familiar with VMware).  Works fine, been running as a guest
> system for a couple of months now, no problems.  I found this to be
much
> easier than reconstructing everything on new hardware.  And now that
> this has been done, I can move the system again and again to new
> hardware as needed with relatively little work.

What are you using for storage on listserv virtual machine? SAN backend

or NAS or iSCSI or ? Is this ESX or VMWare Server?

Can you give a few specifics on number of lists, messages/day, etc?

	tia, al

>>>> [log in to unmask] 5/1/2007 9:18:05 AM >>>
> Site owners,
> 
> Has anyone attempted or had any success with virtualizing the
Listserv
> server? Any limitations? Any horror stories? I am thinking about
> taking my creaking server virtual.